Mystic Chicanery » Musings

YEAH BLIZZCON!

Nibuca — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 19:23:46 +0000

After a frantic 10 minutes where Blizzard refused to accept my credit card and I transfered money elsewhere so we could use a different card.. I finally got tickets for Blizzcon. So yeah! I know where I’ll be at the end of October.

Sorry for the radio silence.. lots of non-WoW things happening.. and not much WoW.

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:

Blizzcon Info
Powered by Where did they go from here?

AVR and Power Auras

Nibuca — Tue, 25 May 2010 17:46:47 +0000

I just had a really chilling thought.. what if Blizz, while “breaking” AVR’s functionality also breaks Power Auras?

That will be a sad sad day. There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:

BETABETABETA

Nibuca — Tue, 18 May 2010 16:51:09 +0000

Are you beta testing or playing a game you can’t wait to play? Me? I’m doing neither. But if you were in the beta… would you actually beta it?

I work in software engineering. My QA person sets up QA tests. It is 42 different versions of poking at the software from every angle. He tests old features to make sure we didn’t break existing functionality. He test new features to make sure they work as advertised. He does things that “real users” would never do. If you were in beta would you ACTUALLY be a -good- beta tester… if not…why should blizz give you access? Especially NDA covered access.

Just sayin’

Oh also, Blizz just announced that Blizzcon Tickets will be available for purchase on June 2 and June 5. Get your refresh buttons ready.

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:

Cataclysm Beta Opt-in

Nibuca — Thu, 13 May 2010 19:00:31 +0000

Cataclysm Beta Opt-in (the real one, not the one that just phishes your account info from you) is now available.

https://www.battle.net/account/management/beta-profile.xml

If your account has an authenticator you will need to have that when you attempt to opt-in.

Really I expected the Alpha to last longer.

Currently prognosticating October for release. I’ll be (happily) surprised if it comes earlier.

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:

Battle.net Noodling

Nibuca — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:35:27 +0000

Things the bug me about RealID.

What if I don’t what to associate my “real” name with my online handle? What if it’s socially unacceptable for me in my RL to be a “gamer” and being “found out” would be bad?

I don’t know my “friends” by their “real” name.. I know them by a handle. Seriously. I don’t call him John Cabrerra, I call him Ryz. It’s NOT less confusing to group all his toons together by his real name. Now, if they allow me to setup the alias I use for his name.. then it will be nice.

What if I want to be invisible? I just don’t feel like “playing with my friends” so I log onto my “secret toon” on my “secret” server just to mess around. With this system my “friends” know all my toons and can see me no matter where I’m logged in.

I just.. I don’t love it.. and I’m not sure I like the direction it’s going.

Idle wondering for today.
When thinking about the battle.net integration we keep talking about WoW and SCII because those are the only ones of Blizzards games that we can see being integrated. Privately I’ve talked with a few people about how useful it will be since it only accounts for those two games.. I mean it doesn’t tell me who’s off playing on the XBOX. That said.. Blizzard is owned by Activision.. and Activision makes Call of Duty II.. and Call of Duty II is integrated with XBox live. What if battle.net is the first step to integrating WoW and SCII into the XBOX Live and the Playstation equivalent..

That might be kind of cool.

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:

Spring Cleaning

Nibuca — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:34:37 +0000

Last night we had a great night raiding. It was 10-man ICC. We downed the lower spire and festergut/rotface in the first 90 minutes of the raid. Then we went on to down Putricide (oneshot) and Blood Princes (4-shot). Finally we downed Valithria (two shot). It was the first time I had EVER attempted Valithria. So.. good night raiding.

After the raid I decided to do some spring cleaning. It’s that time again.

Now, today (or at least this week) open up your bank/vault and look hard at what’s in there. Do you still have enchanting mats from Outland? A Fel Blossom or two? Now pop open your currency tab. Check out all those stones keeper shards.

It’s time for spring cleaning. Cataclysm is coming. Do you honestly want to be lugging all that crap around for another 5 levels? Sell it NOW before it’s all worthless (or at least before everyone else floods the market).

Last night I finally got off my touckus and cleared up my PVP situation. Yes. -I-, NIB, (who doesn’t PVP) had a pvp situation.

I popped open my currency tab and noticed I had over 2 thousand stones keeper shards. So I toddled off to Wintergrasp and spent all those shards on the PVP commendations.

Then I took all ~25k honor which I’ve accumulated since day one with any PVPing I’ve done (the occasional Wintergrasp, the odd battleground (for achievements only)).. anyway, I took the smattering of PVP honor that was just mouldering in my currency tab and all those Wintergrasp commendations to Stormwind.. and I spent them on PVP mounts.

The honor cap is 75,000. PVP mounts cost 50,000. I was able to buy 3 mounts.

As a last note I also turned in all of my stray battleground badges for their honor (they turn in guy is on the ledge looking over the room). THAT was a pain in the ass. Anyway I’m well on my way to getting the 4th mount.

Tomorrow I think I’ll figure out what to do with all 800+ of my Badges of Triumph. What -is- the best Badge sink? Gems? Wrists?

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:

TNB Episode 86 – Constructively Rant-Table

Nibuca — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:13:49 +0000

On Friday we had an Emergency Round Table on TNB. Our guests we had arranged for tonight weren’t able to make it (they had a baby last week). So we’re arranged an “emergency round table”.

Since the blogosphere just blew up about the 10- vs 25- man changes Blizzard announced I thought that might be a good topic of discussion.

Boy was I right. I recommend you listen to it.

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:

Post 1000
Powered by Where did they go from here?

Post 1000

Nibuca — Mon, 03 May 2010 23:07:23 +0000

This is post 1000. That’s a lot to say on one topic(that one topic being WoW). Unfortunately I have nothing today worthy of being the thousandth idea.

Caffeine has suddenly doubled in size.
On Saturday we did our first 25-man raid. We fielded 20 of those and pugged in 5. We had at least the 5 more in the guild.. but they were’t logged in or weren’t available at the time of the raid. Of those 5, one of them has since become a guildie.
On Sunday we downed Putricide in our 10-man raid. It was our second downing in-guild.
Tonight.. our second 10-man is supposed to run in ICC. Yes.. that’s two 10-mans in one week.

Yes, the future is looking very shiny.

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:

How I became GM of an unnamed guild.
Powered by Where did they go from here?

Alot of Random

Nibuca — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:42:11 +0000

Blizz Store continues to hate me. My order for Star Pony -still- won’t go through. This makes me sad. I may actually have to call and talk to a human being to complete my order. Yeah.. because sitting on hold to get them to take my money was on the TOP of my list of things to do.
I was Raid Lead for our 10-man this week. Mostly it was alts and don’t-play-very-often mains. I felt all fuzzy and disconnected. I haven’t lead a raid in MONTHS. I think I need to un-rustify myself.
Roose texted me and asked if I’d noticed a DPS drop. Roose is another warlock on our server. I know him outside the game. He said that after Tuesday’s deploy he noticed a drop in DPS and asked if I’d noticed the same. I had, sort of, but since I was raid leading I didn’t pay much attention to it (Raid leading was distracting me from optimizing my rotations). Also, since it was and alt-ish run.. even though I think I was personally down in DPS I still came in at a top DPS position. Any other warlocks notice a drop?
Another, more advanced guild decided to join . A lot of things when into their decision.. and in fact they had to do a server transfer to join.. I think we got 18 new accounts. This doubles the size of Caffeine and suddenly puts 25-mans into reach. It also will inevitably lead to some growing pains.
We need to adjust our policies to account for the increased number of people.. and we also need to work diligently to integrate the new people. I don’t want to end up with Us and Them. We are Caffeine. They will be assimilated. We will add their distinctiveness to our own.
The in-game interface for adding/adjusting guild ranks SUCKS. I need to add some intermediate ranks and I’m dreading the task.
Stop from Stoppable Force (who’s a tank in Caffeine) mentioned that in Cataclysm, in addition to limiting us to one raid size per lockout.. they’re also talking about letting you change from a 10- to 25-man on a boss by boss basis (blue link). This is super hot. I’m totally in favor of that. Granted.. if you go from 25 to 10.. then 15 people get gyped out of the seeing the last of the dungeon.. but hey.. if they were really worried about that they would have showed up for the second night of raiding.
If you haven’t read this you really should (yes, I made the title on purpose.. and yes, everytime I see Alot I giggle inside).

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:

And a pony too?

Nibuca — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:49:20 +0000

Well I’ll be damned.

This morning I sat down to write a post.. and I started writing about how annoyed I was to spend all week every week in ICC.. either ICC-10 or ICC-25.. regardless I am always in ICC.. I’m utterly bored with ICC. SO after writing ~3 paragraphs about this I decided the topic was kind of boring.. and wasn’t really going anywhere.. and had no conclusions that changed everything. So I deleted the proto-post and went back to thinking about other things.

In the course of “thinking about other things” I clicked over to the blue tracker.. and stumbled on a recent (this morning) blue post about just that topic.. and Blizz’s plans for Cataclysm.. and find that they have address ALL of the things that have been bugging me.

Raid changes in Cataclysm:
– One lockout per dungeon. You will only be able to attempt 10 OR 25 each week..and once you’re locked into a 10 you can’t go do the 25 of that same dungeon.
– 10s and 25s will drop the same loot. 25s will drop more loot/badge/gold per person than 10s to offset the “difficulty in running 25 man teams”. BUT the same items will be found in both versions of the dungeon.
– At each progression level there will be multiple shorter dungeons available so you can choose which raid to do instead of being locked always into the same one.

So.. ok.. wow. Good morning.

Tomorrow I plan to abort an article writing about Warlock burst damage. Just so you know. /wink