Free Candy For Everyone

Here’s a nice little story of a Paladin’s journey to Orgrimmar, the major Horde city. Found it over at WOW Insider, a blog I started reading recently because I really just can’t get enough World of Warcraft. Well. Ok, maybe I can get enough, but I like reading, ok?

Anyway, the blog sometimes has some stuff I didn’t know about on it, and I’ve been enjoying it. The other day, there was a post up that seems to be gone - basically, some guy out there wrote a scathing blog post about how sucky WOW Insider is and how they’re not “Insiders” at all, and some of them are in fact, “noobs” or whatever. It had some really amusing (to me, someone not involved) comments on it back and forth between the angry guy and some WOW Insider staffers, but I cannot find it anywhere. Oh well, the impermanence of the internet strikes again. I’ll just have to tell you to trust me, it was funny.

Edit: I was wondering what mod he’s using, as were some others. Apparently it’s Discord Unit Frames, which can be found here.

I haven’t really been been into the whole machinima thing (Red vs Blue is probably the best known example of machinima - click videos on the sidebar to see some in action). Maybe that’s because I never watched any. In my copious spare time today, I was web browsing and found a link to a World of Warcraft video in the spirit of the Mac switch ads they used to have on TV. Here’s the direct download page, and here’s the author’s homepage.

It’s worth a watch if you’re a crazy rabid WoW player. Or if you know why people complain about Shamans and Paladins (one’s too good, one’s not good enough). Anyway, I got a kick out of it. I know there are a ton of World of Warcraft machinima out there, maybe it’s time I start checking them out. Anyone got any recommendations?

I am so cool.

Gnome Warrior Gnomes are strange little things. Fascinated with gadgets and shiny things, gnomes are often plotting and planning - but are pretty smart, despite all the explosions. As a warrior, you like to take charge of things. You feel that you’re an important part of what’s happening - and if things turn sour, you like to have a very large weapon on hand that you can use to negotiate. Find out your real-life WoW race and class at QuizGalaxy.com

Found this over a plaguelands.

I still really like Guitar Hero (as you can see in my review). It remains both fun and challenging. Sometimes too challenging. Which leads me to my ideas on what Harmonix could do in the next iteration. Provided the games does well enough to warrant another iteration. But I think it will. I mean, I was in Best Buy this weekend (a long story, usually I avoid going within 15 miles of a shopping center in the weeks before Christmas, but it was unavoidable) and they had a huge demo set up very prominently, with a huge stack of the games/controllers. It must be doing well! Anyway, on to my suggestions!

Add a practice mode.
There are two ideas I have on how to do this. The simplest thing to do is to just add an unscored mode. Let you chose the difficulty level, but don’t fail the song if you don’t play the notes. Remove the crowd noise, and play the notes whether you hit them or not, so you can get a sense for how the song goes.

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A couple of days ago, I grouped up with some random people to do a quest with my WoW character Raelle. She’s a level 22 priest, and she’s the fourth character I’ve made, so I’ve figured out a few things along the way. In my party, there was another level 22 priest with a similar set of skills to mine, and she was commenting on how she never had any money. I shared some pointers with her on how to make money and realized how much I would have loved to have that info readily available when I started playing. So here goes, Tara’s Guide to a Profitable World of Warcraft experience.

You can pick up two professions for your character, and these fall into gathering and crafting categories. For example, Mining is a gathering profession, you find ore sites in the world and you gather ‘em up. Blacksmithing is a crafting profession, and it takes ore (and other goods) to make items.

1) Take only gathering professions if you really want to rake in the cash

I don’t actually follow this tip, but it’s something one of the fellow addicts I work with told me, and it’s very valid. Most players take crafting skills, and at the higher levels, these skills all start require elements from many different gathering professions. For example, Nhevya is a Blacksmith, and there are some recipes that take not just metal ores but leather. I need to buy leather from a fellow player. Crafting is a much slower way to make money because it costs a lot to make any good item. The return on your investment tends to be smaller.

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