Tag Archive: World of Warcraft

Post-quitting thoughts

Posted Apr.07, 2011 under Random

I’ve been tumbling with a lot of feelings after quitting WoW, and especially after shutting down the WoW-portion of this blog. It’s been a weird experience to come home from work and not immediately log on to WoW. I still find myself checking MMO-Champion, and I still hang out on my guilds forums and Ventrilo at times. But I find that the general routine that I’ve been used to for years has suddenly been broken. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to have the extra time, but it’s still difficult to completely detach myself from the memories.

The comments that I got after I announced my leaving WoW, on the blog, on Twitter and on e-mail, surely warmed my heart a lot. Naturally, I’ve been following the progress and visits on my site, but a lot of my readers has been silent throughout the years, and while I’ve had a clear idea of the direction I wanted to take the site, it’s been difficult to gauge if I had any sort of success with it. But judging from the comments I’ve seen in the past week, I think the end result was fairly good.

One comment really struck home. I’ve been harassed on Twitter by @Oestrus for quite a while, and she recently launched a brand new WoW podcast, the Double O Podcast. In the first episode, they dropped a sort of a tribute to the blog, and it’s nice to hear that people saw my blog in the way that I had meant it to be: Low key, accessible and easy to understand, with a bit of humor thrown in there from time to time. I’ve wanted to be a front figure for the fight for moonkins, and I’ve wanted to influence the community in a positive way, especially in the times where everybody has seemed to view moonkins in a very negative light. It’s nice to hear that at least one person thinks I’ve been fairly successful at that.

All in all, I’m feeling pretty good about my choice to quit World of Warcraft. I don’t hold any resentment to the game, as I feel that many does after quitting, and I can’t say with absolute certainty that I’ll never be back in the game, but for now, it feels like it’s time to focus on the things to come, and not what once was.

- QQ

Oh, you should definitely check out the Double O Podcast. Two cute ladies talking about games – what’s not to like?!

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How to make an MMO

Posted Jan.05, 2011 under Random

New MMO’s are springing up left and right, and you want to make your own. Why shouldn’t you? All the other kids are doing it! Here’s a quick and easy walkthrough on how to get started:

Funding

MMO’s require very little funding. All you really need is a few friends with coding and graphics experience, and six years of your life. It will probably help if you aren’t too attached to any family, friends or partners when you start your project – it takes so much of your time to come up with excuses to avoid any aggro coming your way for spending all day inside your parents basement.

The setting

Think up a world with magical creatures, gloomy looking forests and powerful monsters. You need at least one desert area, one jungle area, a spooky zone and something with snow. Read More »

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Moonkin guide 4.0

Posted Oct.09, 2010 under World of Warcraft
This post is no longer updated. For the updated Moonkin guide, please find it in the new and improved Cataclysm moonkin guide (which I will continue to update) in the top, or by clicking here!

Patch 4.0 is right around the corner, and with it comes a whole lot of changes to our class. For some reason, I thought I had plenty of time before I needed to re-write the Moonkin guide, failing to realise the abundance of questions that are bound to come when 4.0 hits the live servers.

So I buckled up and started typing. Obviously, some things are still the same. Professions and enchants hasn’t been changed on the PTR, so I won’t meddle with them in the guide before the changes are active. I assume that most enchants such as +81 spell power will be changed to +81 intellect, but until they do, I’ll keep those sections as they are.

Rest assured that I will keep updating this as 4.0 comes out, and naturally throughout Cataclysm as well. I’ll add this guide to the button at the top once 4.0 hits the live servers. I’ll also post this guide out to MMO-champion and the like when 4.0 comes around – you get to read it now, because you are here ;)

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Graphics galore

Posted Aug.13, 2010 under Random

Many moons ago, I asked a few people what they thought my site needed in terms of layout. And the most concerning bit of feedback I got was that the site wasn’t very moonkin-y. It wasn’t really immediately obvious that this was a moonkin blog, what with the weird name and such. It would only really be people who had been on the blog before and read the posts, who would really know that it was a moonkin blog. New visitors would have to read the content, and by then, you might actually already lose a potential reader.

To begin with, I changed the theme of the blog and added the changing gallery at the top of the front page to let people in on what the site was about. That was all fine and dandy, but it wasn’t enough. I set out to find something bigger…

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Real ID or Really Bad ID(ea)?

Posted Jul.07, 2010 under Random

9th of July update: In the wake of some 12 million people complaining about the Real ID name change, Blizzard has reconsidered their wish to bring real names to the forums. Nethaera made a post on the US forums, saying that due to the community’s feedback, they have decided to scrap the idea.

I think it’s nice to see that Blizzard does in fact still have the players in mind, despite people’s claim that they are simply droning for Activisions moneyhogging. It would have suprised me if they had gone through with the idea with all the negative feedback they got on the forums. Blizzard still loves us, and we still love Blizzard. Now, lets go kill some dragons!

The other day, Blizzard released a press statement regarding some of their plans for Real ID in the future. If you have been living under a rock, the Real ID is the new system in World of Warcraft and in upcoming game releases, which allow you to “connect” with friends via e-mail, with no restrictions based on server, faction or even game.

With their press release, Blizzard shared with us their brand new idea: Lets have forum posts show peoples real names! If you have seen my previous post on Real ID, you will know that I think that there are some security and privacy risks with the Real ID system, although they are some that can be circumvented rather easely. These news, however, adds a whole new level of concern.

Blizzard states that their reason for wanting to show players real names on forum posts is to avoid the trolling and the not so serious posts. Their sentiment is that, if people can see your real name – and find out who you are – you won’t be quick to troll them. This makes my face spasm in ticks, because it could also be a way of saying “If someone IS trolling you, well, try and google their name”.

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Blizzard’s Real ID

Posted Jun.21, 2010 under Random

Patch 3.3.5 comes to the US this week, and with it comes Blizzard’s new Real ID system. To sum it up quickly, Real ID lets you add friends to your battle.net account, rather than your friends list ingame. This lets you see if they are logged on, what game they are playing, what character and what server they are on – that’s right, Big Brother is watching, and you’re it!

I totally “get” the idea. It would be strange if Blizzard runs three major games and don’t offer some way to communicate between them. I can chat with my friend while he flies around in Starcraft 2, and my guild master can see if I’m skipping a raid to play Diablo 3.

Of course, people can’t see you like this unless they know your Battle.net e-mail. You have to share that e-mail with your friends before they can add you, and you have to approve new friends as they send a request – online the current friend system ingame that just lets people add you without your knowledge. They get more information on you, after all, so that is fitting.

Check out my new post on Real ID – real names on public forums!

Incidently, my Battle.net e-mail is also my personal e-mail. An e-mail that many people have, that many people can find via Facebook and forums, so I worry just how many requests I might get. Unwanted requests, that is. The Facebook tool is slightly annoying – only slightly. A quick way to avoid this whole Facebook thing would be to hide your e-mail from friends, making the tool unable to see your e-mail and unable to check if it is tied to a Battle.net account. Or, you could simply change the e-mail on your Bnet account – although that seems like a bit of a hassle.

I guess it would be a bit too paranoid to think that random business contacts were to look me up just to see if I was a gamer, and even if they did, they would be marked as nerdy little gamers too. However, it is free to create a Battle.net account, so the question really is if its possible to create a Bnet account with no games at all, and add people to it.

So is it actually useful? Yes, I suppose it is for some people. Personally, there are very few people I would add, if any. I have a very good friend who is likely to play a lot of Starcraft 2 – but we can chat over MSN or the like anyways. Then there are some old friends from previous guilds that would be fun to talk to – but I have those on MSN as well, and with the luxury of no less than three monitors, I don’t think I’m going to miss room for an MSN chat box. It would be cool to talk to alliance players on my server, but I don’t know any, but I suppose it could be fun to add other druids who are active in the community, and have a chat with them once in a while.

To be fair, I don’t have that many friends… who plays Blizzard games. I mean, real life friends… who plays Blizzard games. I can count them on one hand. Oh sure, there are probably more, but we don’t really talk WoW or anything. I consider many of my guild mates my friends as well, but there is no need for them to have my Real ID when all of my alts are on the same server and in the same guild. And if I’m not ingame, I am usually on Ventrilo.

But I may just be a special case. It might just be me, so saturated with other programs and so snoppy about this new initiative that I won’t really find a use for it. It is a good idea, and I’m sure that there are tons of people who will benefit a lot from it. I just don’t think I would use it for more than just a few people, if any.

How about you? Will you be a Real ID fanatic?

Check out my new post on Real ID – real names on public forums!
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