Posts with tag korean

From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame.

This is the story of Apathius, a Romanian student of languages who's made World of Warcraft her entree to the Korean language and culture. "A year ago, I used to be a slightly hardcore raider on the EU realms," she writes. "Being a big fan of anime and all that stuff, I opted for a chance to study abroad in Korea. (Japan was out of the question, sadly, but Korea was pretty close, culture-wise.) So at the start of 2010, I hopped on a plane and came here to start a 'new life,' so to speak. But still, there are huge cultural differences between the Asian world and the west, and for fear that I might not adapt to this new environment, I decided to make WoW one of my mediums for permeating Korean society."

"I thought I knew WoW well enough to get the hang of things quickly, but I ended up having to re-learn a lot of things, especially PVE-wise," she continues. "'Korean Style!' my guildies told me when I first asked them why almost no one raids as a guild here. I was surprised when I heard they PUG heroic raids like Alone in the Dark and Lich King 25-man. But that doesn't mean they're hardcore, as even the casuals do very well. For example, people who had never seen Putricide before went from a 80% wipe to a 5% wipe after three tries. Also, if you're a top-end raider, you can earn about 5,000ish gold per week from raids, because the DKP here is gold, and only gold. The weirdest part about it though, I really get the feeling they take the PVE side of WoW as fun, not as competition, not as something to be taken seriously, just as a means of getting imba gear and seeing new fights."

Join us for one player's quixotic journey through an American game on a European realm from her Romanian homeland to a new home and new realm in Korea.

The Electronic Sports League's Intel Extreme Masters Global tournament has ended, and Korean team H O N have come out on top. And according to World of Ming, they completely impressed every player at the tournament -- while they were one of four teams taking the Rogue/Mage/Priest combination to the upper brackets, they apparently played that comp in a way that just rolled on through any competitors (including having their mage, Orangemarmalade, apparently keeping a match alive even after his teammates dropped). Everyone's expecting the RMP domination by the time the next Arena season rolls around, but for now, RMP is where it's at in professional arenas.

Unfortunately for us Americans, the US teams didn't put on much of a showing -- they dropped out quick, and WoM reports that their behavior after the losses was less than classy. They apparently blamed a teammate for dropping out, and it doesn't help that, unlike the Korean teams who have played the same classes and characters for a long time, the Americans apparently came up with their teams and tactics only recently. Looks like they'll have to do a little reforming and rebuilding before this year's BlizzCon.

Congrats to all the teams who walked away with victories in the ESL's Arena tournament. Even from Ming's commentary, it sounds like it was an exciting few days for Arena players.

The Warcraft Characters app for iPhone that we reported on a while ago has been updated to version 2.0, and with it come a host of terrific improvements. As we were told last time, gear has been added in, so your iPhone can not only show you information about your (or anyone else's) characters, but it can now also show you all of their gear, and even reputation status. And there's good news for non-US users, too: the app now supports characters from any and all realms, not just US and EU, but Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese realms as well. The only thing that's still missing is seeing individual talents -- otherwise, it's as featured an app as you can get. Sure, guild search and stats might be nice, and there's always extra features like be.imba integration, or character comparisons, but as a portable Armory, it works great as is. We're not sure if this is all Rudi's work or a result of a teamup with Omen of Clarity (who's been working on an iPhone web app for a while), but either way, great job.

And there's a shiny new icon, too (and I like it a lot better). Characters is now available on the iPhone's App Store for the low, low price of free.

Bornakk announced last night that we can expect what could be a fun change for this and future PTRs: the US, Korean, and EU servers will share test realms. We might speculate that this could be delaying the release of the PTRs despite the fact that we have the notes and the patch in hand, though it is, of course, possible that it's the problems with the live servers right now as well.

Regardless, it'll be interesting to see how this changes the test dynamic as testing goes forward. There's been some questions in the past over which region's raid groups are better, so it might be fun to see if they decide to duke it out over the new Sunwell content face-to-face. It might be fun to see if some multi-region arena tourneys get set up as well. Even on the casual side, some of us have overseas internet friends who play on different servers than us by necessity, so it should be great to meet up with them and kill a few monsters or do a few dailies together.

Of course, before we get to see if anything fun comes out of this, we'll have to make it on the PTRs. We'll be sure to tell you as soon as we see them up and running!

The Warcraft universe is constantly expanding. Trading card games, sound tracks and board games abound. It seems we can't get enough of Azeroth online or off. Blizzard has tried to meet this growing demand is by creating a series of fiction novels and comic books. One of those endeavors is a Korean manga title, Dragon Hunt, the first novel in the Sunwell Trilogy that was published last year.

Now, our friends over at the WoW Europe official site have made Dragon Hunt available to read online for free! Every week they are putting up a new chapter. So far there are three chapters to read and I already can't get enough. Head on over, check it out and tell us what you think.