WoW 2.0 Patch

The news is out. A number of sites are reporting that on December the fifth, Blizzard will release the patch that updates World of Warcraft to version 2.0. This will implement all of the functionality that associated with the Burning Crusade expansion that everyone will get, regardless of whether they purchase the expansion or not. The major changes that we will see are for the talent trees, and the honor system. My understanding is that all talents will be reset, so now is the time to work out what you will invest your talents in.

And for all you honor grinders out there. This is your last week to get to your desired BG rank before it goes the way of the Dodo.

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Happy Thanksgiving

We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here in Australia, but for all my American readers, I’d like to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving from Downunder.

Don’t each too much turkey, or is that don’t eat too little? I can never remember.

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Gaming Burnout or End of Year Blues

Tobold posted tonight on Measuring World of Warcraft Burnout. He has noticed a recent increase in the number of quit posts on forums, as well as blogs, and cites the financial reporting from The9 Limited as evidence that players are leaving WoW. The9 is the company that runs WoW in China, and is reporting a 10 percent decrease in player activity over the past quarter.

Now there are reasons other than burnout that could be responsible for this decrease. As one of the commenters on Tobolds post mentioned, the Chinese government has put a restriction on how many hours a player can play a MMORPG. This is very likely the primary force that is causing Chinese players to play less.

For the rest of us though, there are probably a number of factors why people are leaving the game.

It’s the end of the year. I don’t know about anybody else, but I always feel tired at this time of the year. I’m looking forward to the Christmas break, and there is always a work deadline that falls at the 23rd of December, or in the first weeks of January. No idea why, our customers are out enjoying their holidays, not reading system specs or test plans.

It’s also the time when a lot of new games get released in time for the holidays. Perhaps players feeling like something different buy a new game and spend a bit of time playing that rather than WoW. I’ll admit to that one too. I purchased Neverwinter Nights 2 the other day, and have spent a few hours playing that. I’m writing up a review at the moment, and should have my First Impressions out in a day or three.

The end of the year is not just about feeling tired, it’s also about getting things done before the break. Students have exams, workers have deadlines, and everyone is expected to do more family oriented activity.

Finally, everyone is expecting the Burning Crusade expansion to change how certain aspects of the game is played, as well as to reduce the importance of certain high end items that can only be gained through raids. If the PvP system is changing, why bother running battlegrounds until your eyes bleed to gain that extra rank if it is all gone in a month and a half? Why bother raiding every night of the week for tier 4 armor if the green items you get at 63 are much better? May as well take a break until the expansion is released.

So is it burnout? Certainly for some players. WoW is like every other game, it’s only worth playing while it’s fun. And if some players are burnt out and not enjoying the game, then yeah, they’ll leave.

For the majority I think, it’s more likely the end of year blues. Tiredness, business, and the expectation of something new and different when the Burning Crusade comes out. I know that I’ve been feeling that to some extent, but I’m also feeling excited about the new content that will soon be upon us. I’ll be wandering into Outland early next year with a look of expectation and wonder on my face.

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Confounding the Spammers

I started this blog a bit over two months ago now, in mid-September. A couple of days after I started, I submitted an article (Account Security) to Problogger for a writing contest at the time. What was interesting was the number of trackbacks I got from other blogs simply listing the contest entries. There were a lot of links to my site.

This produced another result. The next day at work I tried to view my website, only to find that it had been blocked for inappropriate content. When I got home later, I checked and found that my blog had been targeted by the most foul beasts imaginable, much worse than even the worst WoW boss. Spammers.

I wasn’t just getting spam, I was getting the most unbelievably filthy pron spam. I deleted it, and went on the search for a solution. I found a free Wordpress plugin called Akismet and installed it.

Today, about two and half months later, Akismet has blocked over 1000 comment spam messages, with only one false positive. Thank you Akismet.

I highly recommend this service to anyone considering starting a blog on their own server.

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You know you are playing too much World of Warcraft when - Part 4

Some more hints that you’ve been playing too much World of Warcraft.

You know you’ve been playing too much World of Warcraft when:

1. 1. You think about hearthing home at the end of a long day.
2. 2. You feel like a beer and think about hearthing to the pub (inn).
3. 3. You get a ‘pot’ of coffee.
4. 4. Your friend says Wow! and you immediately think of WoW.
5. 5. A door to door salesman comes to the door and you try and get your cat to attack.
6. 6. You finally finish that report at work and yell Horde FTW!
7. 7. A player gets tackled in a footy game, and you yell, “Pwnd!”
8. 8. You wish the weeds in your garden were kingsblood.

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A Week is a Long Time

Wow. It’s true what they say about a week being a long time in politics. It’s also a long time in blogging, and definitely a long time in guild affairs.

Especially in guild affairs. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, a month or so ago a number of members split off to form their own guild. This made it difficult to get our raids scheduled. Unfortunately, an alliance with another guild fell through, which made it impossible to do MC.

Our members have also been struggling with long, extremely long, queues which have made some question wether they want to continue to pay for the privledge of sitting in a queue. Others have been hit by daylight savings changes, where the gap between the server time and the local time has increased.

I’ve also been very busy with work and family affairs and haven’t been on enough to deal with these problems as they occur.

Well, last weekend and over this week, the consequence of all these factors jumped up and bit us in the arse. The guild has lost around 12 members, including officers, and it’s made everyone feel a bit discouraged. Did I say a bit? I think that’s an understatement.

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Not So Lucky After All

Turns out my lucky day wasn’t so lucky after all.

After WoW last night I attempted to download the Supreme Commander beta from Fileplanet. I created an account, logged in, went to the beta page and tried to download. Then got sent to a page that presented one of those images with letter combinations. Except this image said "Invalid Key." And Invalid Key meant there was something wrong with my browser, firewall, popup blocker, or perhaps the stars weren’t properly aligned.

I normally use Opera, so I tried IE6. I disabled all the security measures. I disabled my popup blocker. Neither Opera or IE worked. This morning I downloaded Firefox 2. That didn’t work either.

So I have put a help request in to Fileplanet. If they can’t help, I suppose that will be it for the Supreme Commander beta for me.

Pity. I was looking forward to having a bash.

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My Lucky Day

I stopped in at my local EB Games store on my way home from work tonight, to see if Neverwinter Nights 2 had come in, it hadn’t. Australian players are getting it next week. But… I asked about my preorder of the Burning Crusade expansion, and was told it will be in store on the 17th of January. Only one day after the worldwide release.

When I put down my 10 bucks for the expansion, I asked that if I could get the collectors edition. There wasn’t a code for it at the time, and I wasn’t sure there would be a collectors edition available in Oz. Turns out the collectors edition is coming to our sunburnt country, but in very limited numbers. The EB Games guy told me that there are only going to be 1000 collectors edition versions for the whole of Australia, EB Games is getting 300, and my local store will be getting seven.

Naturally curious, I asked if I would be one of the seven. Wooo Hooo. I am. I put my order in early enough, and asked about the collectors, which a lot of people didn’t. Good timing, eh?

While I was there I got to talking with him. I tend to do that. We discussed a couple of things, and the conversation turned on to RTS games. Now, I haven’t really played a RTS for a while. I played a lot of Warcraft 2 & 3, Command and Conquer 1, 2, Red Alert, Age of Empires, Starcraft, and Total Annilihation. (I mentioned the other day it had one of my favorite intro movies.) When I mentioned that I played/loved TA, the sales clerk went behind the counter and produced a card for the Supreme Commander Multiplayer beta, and gave it to me. How cool is that?

Supreme Commander is supposed to be the spiritual successor to TA, developed by Chris Taylor’s Gas Powered Games. Chris Taylor is one of the minds behind TA.

So I reckon later tonight, after some time in WoW, I’ll download the beta and have a bit of a squiz, probably tomorrow. Tonight we have a MC raid scheduled if we get enough players to come along. (Unfortunately, our alliance with Ravage isn’t going ahead so it’s going to be difficult to get the numbers for MC. But that’s another story.)

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Attack of the Clones

I was reading AFK Gamers blog this morning and he has a post up called Posers. After reading a post on the official forums, he did a search on his character name and came up with a bunch of other characters with the same name.

Well, when you read something like that you have to do the same thing, don’t you?

So I headed over to Warcraft Realms and did the search myself. Guess what, there are a bunch of Stropps out there too! There are a couple of 60’s which probably means they didn’t get the name from this blog. But I also see a whole lot of low levels, from 2 - 23, that make me wonder.

Of course Stropp isn’t original either. Stropp was the mate of Hoges on the 70’s television show, The Paul Hogan Show, and his manager in real life. You have to love his hangover cure… or not.

The good news? At least there weren’t any Stropp Gnomes.

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Burning Crusade Release Date

I thought that the BC release date had already been given as the 30th of January, but it looks like I was wrong. This morning there are a bunch of posts around the web stating that the release date for the Burning Crusade expansion is the 16th of January. Excellent, I have been looking forward to this (as you’ve probably guessed.) I’m happy it’s two weeks earlier than I thought it would be.

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