Posts with tag march

So as I logged in each and every character recently to sync up all my goodies in preparation for Mists, I rediscovered a strange little level 1 gnome tucked away on Blackrock. Argent Dawn players, do you still have a thing going with the players on Blackrock? I haven't played on AD in years now, but back in the days of unstable launch-era servers, the "Blackrock kiddies" chose Argent Dawn to torment with their server-crashing antics whenever their own realm would crash. I'm not sure how making the AD players miserable with legions of profanity-blasting players shouting "Blackrock down! Blackrock down!" and taunting us for being roleplaying pansies was supposed to help their situation -- but it became a regular occurrence. Ironforge (best capital to hang out in because you could connect so quickly to Menethil) on Argent Dawn became a living hell whenever Blackrock went down. The lag was so bad you could guarantee you'd end up in the trench between the auction house and the bank.

Then came the glorious day when Argent Dawn went down. I still can't believe I did it, but I did -- I joined the players flooding onto Blackrock to create level 1 gnomes. (Bad player. Bad.) We delighted in tacking on RP-esque "-eth" suffixes to the most ridiculous-sounding names we could think of, and we dogpiled onto the bridges of Ironforge for a naked gnomish dance party, chanting "AD down! AD down!" (Not sure what that guy in the screenshot shouting about drugs was all about. Looks like we didn't even manage to keep our main chant going. Oh, well.) I don't guess we ended up accomplishing anything of note -- we didn't crash Blackrock like their players did ours so many times, nor did we really intend to -- but it sure felt good to return the annoyance for just that little while.

On a more serious note, WoW has been home to plenty of in-game marches, demonstrations, and protests of various sorts over the years. It was a very different era of customer relations back then, and many in-game protests were simply attempts to garner some attention from Blizzard over issues players felt strongly about. Today, of course, players enjoy much freer communication with Blizzard on the official forums, Blizzard blogs, and even Twitter and Facebook.

Have you ever protested or marched in game over a game-related issue? Did you feel it was effective? Do you post in feedback threads and interact with the Blizzard blues outside the game now?

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Blizzard has announced that some information is coming about the highly anticipated Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's fourth expansion -- well, information with regards to when there will be information about Mists of Pandaria. In the middle of March, Blizzard will hold a special press event for members of the media to see what kind of progress has been made, in showable form, since BlizzCon 2011's impressively far-along demo.

As Nethaera posted, information is coming, and we now have a date. This feels like Blizzard's taking a page from the Apple book. Pressers and hype events like these work incredibly well for a company like Blizzard that is very much an Apple of its industry. By calling its own press conferences, conventions, and press trips rather than announcing information amongst the rest of the gaming industry at conventions like PAX, the message is much more focused and clear -- the cacophony is removed. I'm excited to know when new information will be available. Of course, I'd rather have the information, but a day to hope for is better than nothing. It's gonna get busy in March.

Don't forget -- we're just a few days away from the end of the month, which means we're going to be wrapping up the first month of our new Guild of the Month contest. If you think your guild is overly exceptional, really original, or just generally awesome, let us know about it: we're asking for 200-word entries, which you can send along to guildofthemonth@gmail.com (remember also that you need to be in the US or Canada excluding Quebec -- official rules are here), and next week we'll be choosing our first winner.

They'll be profiled right here on WoW Insider, and they'll even pick up a raid pack from our friends over at Swagdog. Even if you don't win, you can go over to Warcraft.Swagdog.com and pick up customized guild gear, both shirts and hats with your guild's logo and name on them. Very cool.

If you haven't entered the contest yet and think your guild can be chosen as the best of the month, please do enter. And stay tuned -- after the first of the month, we'll reveal the winner for March, and then the contest starts all over again.

We haven't heard much from the folks at You Play or We Pay lately, but maybe that's a good thing for them -- after all the noise from their initial launch, it seems like things have calmed down over there. They're giving out "Compensation Credits," it looks like they've started running a few ads, and it seems like they've finally settled on a model that works for everyone -- both the founders of the site and the people who sign up for compensation. While we heard the first month of slots filled up pretty fast, the second month seems to be going a little slower -- they've still got about half the slots for March still available as of this writing. But as you can see from the picture, they're promising some real items in exchange for those Compensation Credits. With 150 slots in March and about 100 credits given out last month, you may be waiting over a year to save up the credits to buy a 30-day game card, but the site is working the way they planned: you can sign up for free and eventually get something back for your realm's downtime.

And they're planning on expanding soon -- the site reports that by the 15th of March, English EU players will be able to sign up for compensation on their realms' downtime as well. This site caused a lot of controversy when it first opened up, but we have to give it to them: it looks like they've worked out a way to do what they want to do.

This isn't about World of Warcraft, but it will be familiar to some of you who spent hours building up bases and creating Spirit Towers. Beyond the Game is a new documentary from the Netherlands about two world-famous Warcraft III players and how the game has affected their lives and the people around them. It looks intriguing -- having been to a few gaming tournaments and interviewed a few of the top players myself, I agree that these guys are living some really strange lives. Even if you're not a Warcraft III player, this kind of esports is getting more and more popular around the world (from the old Counterstrike to WoW's Arenas, of course), and even though it hasn't quite hit the mainstream yet, more and more players are finding this kind of existence.

The film is set to be released in parts of the EU mid-March, and is being shown at a few gaming tournaments in various places around the world. There's no word on a US or DVD release yet, but we'll keep an eye out for it.

So it's time for WoW Insider to do you all a favor. It seems like whenever we attempt to predict the timing of a certain patch, Blizzard ignores whatever we say, and drops it right away. With patch 2.2, we predicted in early September that it would take "weeks" longer, maybe even last November, and instead they had it out within the month. And with patch 2.3, we guessed that Blizzard wouldn't drop it before Thanksgiving, and just hours later they proved us wrong, and released it before the holiday.

So here you go: with everything we've seen on the forums lately, including the CMs a little giddy with excitement, and all of the news that dropped last week, we're going to officially predict that patch 2.4 will drop on the PTRs this coming Tuesday, and that it will hit the live realms sometime in early March (probably before Noblegarden, which starts on March 23rd).

There. Now, Blizzard has plenty of chances to prove us wrong by releasing the PTR sometime this week, and getting the patch out to live realms before March 1st. That's our favor to you-- if Blizzard follows their past pattern, they'll make us completely wrong again, and get you on the PTR and in the patch even sooner than we thought.

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul's internet regiment has come to World of Warcraft-- a group of his supporters are planning to form a guild on Whisperwind and do a march from IF to Stormwind (which means they'll probably be Gnomes or Dwarves, which is too bad, because I liked the idea of "Trolls for Ron Paul") on New Year's Day at 8:30pm EST.

Now, we here at WoW Insider are politically neutral when it comes to Warcraft, so we won't advocate joining these guys (and we also won't advocate forming a "Horde for Hillary" guild to oppose them). But we are 100% in support of bringing widescale opinion expression of any kind into the game itself, so this should definitely be a fun event.

As always, if you go, take pictures and send them to us. And if you hear about any other political rallies in World of Warcraft this coming election year, let us know about those, too-- we'd love it if a presidential candidate (any of them) somehow got some extra buzz just because he (or she) was able to get out "the Orgrimmar vote."

Thanks, Paul!