Posts with tag mikeschramm

Tomorrow, don't forget to tune in to WoW Radio, and check out the third episode of our official podcast, the WoW Insider Show. We're going to kick off the broadcast about 3:30pm EST (which is 8:30pm GMT, I believe), and we've got lots of great discussion items on our platter: we'll hit up AFKers in Alterac (because we haven't talked about that on the podcast yet, right?), the WSVG shutdown shocker, and all of our most popular posts of the last week.

I'm going to be back on the mic this week, and WoW Insider's Amanda Riviera will be joining me, as well as Turpster ("The T," as we like to call him) and Alris from WoW Radio. And of course we want you along for the ride as well: go to wcradio.com tomorrow to listen in live, and we'll also be sitting in the IRC channel at #wowradio on irc.mmoirc.com. And as usual, we'll be watching for your emails: theshow@wow.com is the address for your suggestions, complaints, compliments, or questions you'd like us to answer.

Tune in tomorrow afternoon at 3:30 pm EST for the third episode of the absolute best podcast about WoW Insider: we'll see you on the WoW Insider show.

A big thanks to everyone that tuned into the very first episode of the WoW Insider Show-- lots of good times were had as WoW Radio's Turpster, and Dan O'Halloran and I discussed everything from whether it's OK for a guild leader to ninja a mount to whether we'll fly in Northrend before level 78 or not, all the way back to why gold farming might be OK. Actually, Dan stands alone on that last one-- you can listen to the show, right now, over on WoW Radio's homepage for it to find out exactly what happened. And it's also in iTunes-- here's the link for the iTunes Store if you've got iTunes installed.

Congratulations to listener Chris S for randomly winning the Murloc suit giveaway! Stay tuned for many more giveaways on the show. And if you have comments or suggestions for the show, our email address is theshow@wow.com.

And the WoW Insider Show rolls on-- this coming Saturday, September 8th, at 3:30 pm EST, we'll have our second episode, and you'll be able to listen live over at WoW Radio just like last week. We'll cover everything that's happened in the World of Warcraft over the past week, as well as keep you entertained and give you exclusive insight on everything we write about here at WoW Insider.

So thanks everyone who listened in this week, and be sure to check us out on every Saturday, kicking off at 3:30pm EST.

You've asked us for a podcast, we've considered our options, and now it's time to do it up right. WoW Insider has teamed up with none other than Totalbiscuit and the folks at WoW Radio to create The WoW Insider Show, a weekly audio podcast featuring news and views about World of Warcraft and its community. Every Saturday afternoon at 3:30 EST, WoW Insider will appear live on WoW Radio to talk about the most popular posts of the last week, and what's happening in the World of Warcraft.

We want your insight and your comments, too: our show email will be theshow@wow.com, and that's where you'll be able to send insights both during and after the show. And we'll hook you up for your input-- while you're listening live, you'll be given the chance to win swag as well. For our first show, going down this Saturday, September 1st, we'll be giving away one of our biggest prizes yet: an ingame Murloc suit from BlizzCon. Listen in to learn how to win your chance to wear one of these!

WoW Insider. WoW Radio. Two of the biggest names in the World of Warcraft community have teamed up to bring you the ultimate World of Warcraft podcast. Stay tuned to WoW Insider and our show site at WoW Radio to learn more, and get ready to listen in on Saturday, as WoW Insider's Mike Schramm and Dan O'Halloran take to the air with WoW Radio's Mark 'Turpster' Turpin and Kyle 'Mickey-C' McCarley. Be there!

Well, these aren't really final, of course, as we're going to be discussing and responding to what we saw at BlizzCon all the way up until Wrath of the Lich King releases. But BlizzCon was definitely a crazy experience, so each of us WoW Insider staffers there are going to write up our own personal impressions for you, both about what we saw and what we didn't see there. And please share yours in the comments below.

Most Enjoyable: I really enjoyed the L70ETC concert, actually-- I wasn't quite sure what they would be, but in terms of the live entertainment, Samwise and his band were the best thing going. Yelling "for the Horde" and booing Rogues (who "do it from behind," of course) was great fun. In terms of the events, all the Blizzard guys were entertaining, but Jeff Kaplan was my favorite-- every event he showed up at, he really proved he'd been reading the forums and knew what players were interested in. The Molten Core (as designed by you and 8,999,999 others) was terrific, and while Metzen definitely has a clue, too ("im the lich king lol" is an instant classic), Kaplan was on top of his game all weekend. Oh, and of course the WoW Insider meetup was a big highlight as well-- every single reader I met was awesome.

Least Enjoyable: Waiting in line for passes on Thursday evening was really the only waiting I did all weekend. It was horribly designed-- there were about 30 lines split up by last name, but those lines all got mixed up, and you couldn't see where one started, so you had to cut across lines if you were in the wrong one. They were also mind-numbingly slow, so that definitely could have been done better. Also, we said Jay Mohr was a strange choice, and we were right-- while he did as good a job as he could (he was funnier than I expected), his time on stage alone was mostly just awkward, as the forum trolls ripped him apart. Next time, let's get a comedian who's at least played Warcraft, rather than just seen the South Park episode.

What I was most excited about and most disappointed about at BlizzCon after the jump...

I was actually running Wailing Caverns with a few guildies from IctfB on last Friday night around midnight when I heard the news: Wowhead had sold for $1 million to Affinity Media, the company that supposedly ran IGE, the notorious goldsellers. We'd received a tip from someone who claimed he used to work for IGE, and we rushed to get the story up and also make sure it was right-- word was that Affinity didn't own IGE any more, and that Wowhead had maybe sold because of that.

Still, in the week or so since, players have had plenty of questions. Did Wowhead sell out to goldsellers? Did Affinity really sell IGE and are they really out of the goldselling business? And why did Affinity want to buy yet another database when they already owned both Allakazham and Thottbot? And perhaps most importantly, what kind of changes would come for Wowhead?

WoW Insider got a chance to sit down for an exclusive chat with both John Maffei, president of the ZAM content network at Affinity Media, and Tim Sullivan, CEO of Wowhead, to talk about Affinity's past, the sale of Wowhead, and what's coming next. They wanted to clear up questions, and we wanted to get answers. To read the full, exclusive interview, click the link below.

Looks like at least someone thinks there's an audience for arena PvP-- World Series of Video Games has announced they've signed a deal with CBS (yes, that CBS) to show four one-hour episodes featuring four of their upcoming events. Which means you could be seeing WoW arena matches (including a few guilds dueling it out in real life) on network television in the near future.

Our good friends at Joystiq say the play-by-play will be done by some dude named Greg Amsinger, who has called WSVG events before. He's not the same guy they've got calling arena matches now, is he? Because if so, they should shell out for someone new. No word yet either on who's producing it or what it will be like-- we don't even know for sure that they'll show WoW. They may decide to stick to the slightly-more-accessible first person shooter matches for network TV.

But if you want to watch, the first special is supposed to drop on July 29th, just a few days after the WSVG event in Louisville. Are eSports really going to turn out to become big ticket spectator sports? Looks like we're about to find out.

Here's video, direct from G4, of my appearance on Attack of the Show last night. A little bumpy-- I mixed up Warcraft 3 and WoW (who knows how that happened), and I said the Blood Elves when I meant Draenei, but otherwise I think I got my points across fairly well. I do think Blizzard is going to pull some good elements from WC3 and WoW into SC2, and of course I think this will be a uniquely Blizzard game, no matter who they hire to work on it. For the record, I was right: the poll had 60% of voters saying Starcraft 2 was not a letdown.

I did get a little cut off at the end (that's probably why the mic levels jump a bit), because I was trying to wholly disagree with Garnett: Blizzard is not going to bring this game to consoles. I do agree that they're aiming for Holiday 2008, though, if only because that'll be the 10th anniversary of Starcraft. Thanks to G4 for putting this all together, and thanks to everyone who tuned in and watched it live last night.

Just a note to let you all know that I've been invited to be on G4's Attack of the Show this evening, at 7 and 11 pm Eastern time (so you can watch me on the show, then watch the Heroes or 24 season finales-- I'm recording both, because woot-- and then watch me again!).

They've asked me to talk about Starcraft 2 and Blizzard, so I'll have some juicy tidbits about Blizzard's latest game, I'm sure, and hopefully they'll allow me some commentary about Blizzard at large and how SC2's release might affect World of Warcraft. An entry on their blog (fittingly named Attack of the Blog) says that some other dudes from some other websites may be on there as well (I've always wanted to have a friendly face-off against Crecente on live national television), but we'll see.

So if you get a chance, please check it out. And we should have embedded video up soon. That way you lucky people can revisit my visage on G4 again and again and again. Let us know if you do. Should be fun, see you tonight.

You'll forgive me for trying to inject a little reason into a nerf debate (an impossible task, probably), but that's what I'm about to try and do anyway.

Yesterday, mages, warlocks, and shadow priests were up in arms about the changes on the test realm to the tailoring epic outfits. Blizzard was experimenting with adding ability stats to the armor while nerfing spell damage, and tailors went ballistic over the changes. And so, within a matter of hours, Eyonix announced on the forums that the changes had already been reverted and would not go to the live servers.

Now, yesterday I said the nerfs weren't that big a deal, and since then, I've seen some good points that say they were-- lots of people spent lots of time and gold getting just these recipes together (some even leveled tailoring for just these pieces), and it definitely presents a problem to make serious changes to gear that people have already sacrificed a lot for.

On the other hand, there were good reasons behind the changes as well. As even a few tailors have said, these crafted pieces matched up to the Tier 4 and 5 pieces, and I see problems with basically requiring clothies to be tailors to be competitive in the endgame. Many warlocks cried the most about the changes, but because +spell damage doesn't translate directly to most of their DOT spells, in many cases, they would actually be the least affected (Update: In hindsight, I shouldn't have judged how affected anyone was by this change. But that's not the point of this article-- read on.)

But my point now isn't to argue whether these sets should have been changed or not. What I want to point out now is that being outraged on the forums and yelling at Blizzard about something that's happening on the test realms will actually impede the developers' abilities to make good changes on the live ones.

Our good friends at Xfire have posted the transcripts of last Wednesday's chat about "Life After 70," which I was able to moderate. The guests-- Teza from World of Raids, Nopher from Last Resort on Kazzak-EU, and Skosiris from Wowhead (Awake from Nihilum couldn't make it because they heard Vashj had been hotfixed)-- all did a great job answering the metric ton of questions I tried to push at them, and the "viewers" had a lot of interesting stuff to say as well.

You can see the transcript from the Main Room here, and the transcript from the Open Debate room over here. Both are definitely interesting read throughs. Both of the higher level guilds echoed what Death and Taxes have said-- they use Paladins to heal, and shadow priests to DPS. They also told me that the loot from the 25 man raids has just not matched up to the loot from heroics or Karazhan (although hopefully that will be corrected a bit in the upcoming 2.1 patch). And perhaps most interesting, they said that the drop to 25 man raids didn't create that much drama in their guilds-- for them, the most drama came from the 10 man limit in Karazhan.

All in all, we had a great time, and I'll thank Xfire again for putting it all together (especially Nicolas Cerrato for coordinating everything this time around). If you were able to make it out to the chat (it was set earlier in the afternoon in America, so Europeans could have a prime time chat for themselves), thanks to you as well.

The good folks at Xfire have asked us back to their "Two-Handed Sword" debate club (those of you who joined us last time will remember how much fun it was), and this time they're moving us up in the world: I'm going to moderate. Yes indeedy! The topic is "Life After 70," and they've got some great guests on. Teza from World of Raids is returning as well, and because they're making a point to focus on European players this time around, Awake from Nihilum will be on, as well as Nopher from Last Resort. And the list of guests is finished off by Evilseed from the very informative Wowhead.com.

The chat will be all online, so to join us, you'll have to download and install Xfire, but don't worry, it's free and extremely simple. If you do join us, you'll be able to "listen" in live, as well as join the Open room chat to talk with other players about what we're discussing (that room was even crazier than the main room last time-- I loved it). So the chat will be next Wednesday, April the 11th, at 2pm Eastern time. That's 20:00 CEST if you're in Europe-- they're giving you guys a chance to have a nice primetime even this time. Please join up with us and say hello-- I want lots of WoW Insider representation!

And as I said, this time around I'm not just a guest, I'll be moderating. That means I have to ask questions, I'm pretty sure, so if you have any questions or discussion ideas you'd like me to bring to the chat, please post them in the comments below, and if I choose your question, I'll even mention your name during the chat as a WoW insider reader. Thanks! See you on Xfire next Wednesday!

This video has inspired me to coin what I will call the Lord British Postulate:

If it exists as a living creature in an MMORPG, someone, somewhere, will try to kill it.

History has shown that to be exactly the case, and I, Mike Schramm, deem it to be true. Get to work, Wikipedians.

How else to explain that some crazed player has actually gone after the seemingly harmless A'dal of Shattrath City, and, in a "world first," killed him?



That's just mean. Obligatory: But what did he drop?

And I have to say that it's too bad the naaru didn't put up any more of a fight. Then again, maybe he just despawned. Do beings of sentient energy leave a corpse?

Way back when, I found a post on the forum that suggested that Shaman should get temporary, summoned pets to use, and when I said it'd be a great idea, you guys laughed at me. And yet, come the expansion, we get those fun little Elemental Totems to play around with. So while you might laugh at this suggestion at first, think about it for a second before you say I'm crazy: Let's give Rogues mail!

Guize on Skullcrusher has come up with what I think is a very interesting solution to the problem of endgame survivability for Rogues (we'll put PvP aside for a second and just talk about PvE for now). Currently, as players have said before, Rogues are a liability in most endgame raids-- yes, they can dish out damage, but considering how many endgame bosses pour out AoE, Rogues often end up to be more of a drain on the healers than anything else. I'm sure Cloak of Shadows has helped that a little bit (I haven't got too much experience with it yet, as my Rogue is only 61), but the fact is that while tanks can take it, Rogues take a beating more than any other class (ok, maybe healers take a worse beating, but that's only in a bad party).

Enter Guize's suggestion of a 31-point Combat talent that allows Rogues to wear mail armor (alternately, to avoid having to add tons of new agility mail gear, he says it could just be a talent that bumps up armor from items). That would let PvE Rogues not be so squishy when asked to be right up there on the front lines of melee, and it would help out healers a whole lot, especially on the 25 and even 40 man instances.

Now, in terms of PvP, I have to admit it seems a little unbalanced at first, considering that rogues are basically killing machines. But remember, too, that magic ignores armor-- Warlocks and Priests will still be able to DoT and fear just as much as they did before (and Cloak of Shadows is more of a problem for them anyway, and it's already in the game). There is, of course, the problem that it's really hard to be stealthy when all that mail armor would be clinking around, but if you want to finally give rogues a chance against the endgame AoE bosses, giving them the option to wear mail would definitely do it.