Pandemonium Breaks out in the Champions’ Hall!

General, Roleplaying 6 comments.

TUESDAY, 11 NOVEMBER 2008 — 10.30 p.m. PT

CYNRA, AIREE.NET ANCHOR: Just an hour ago, citizens of Azeroth discovered that many of the items being sold in the Champions’ Hall had experienced an unexpected end of season sale: full Merciless Gladiator sets for priests and warlocks, as well as a number of trinkets, rings, and other pieces of armor were being handed out for free.

Now, droves of people rush to the Champions’ Hall, each with their hands open in order to take part in this bounteous event.

A news conference is now getting underway.  It appears that newly returned King Varian Wrynn, son of the late king Llane Wryn, is addressing reporters.

(JOINED IN PROGRESS)

KING VARIAN WRYNN, STORMWIND: … experiencing an unexpected surge in populace this evening due to this mishap.  We’re not sure why this has happened, but we’re attempting to cope with the situation.

We’re concerned this evening in helping ensure the safety of our citizens.  We’re asking all people to avoid lingering in the Champions’ Hall when they go to get their items.  It’s very easy to injure someone in the large press of bodies there and it’s best if you acquire what you came for and then promptly leave.  Furthermore, the casting of spells while within the Champions’ Hall is frowned on and will be dealt with harsh repercussions; as stated before, safety is our largest concern.

Now I’m going to ask your indulgence for a second on another unrelated — somewhat related but technically unrelated issue.  We noticed after learning of the events transpiring in the Champions’ Hall that some people are using various forms of communication to trick people in our community into believing that items are also being given out in Shattrath, the Caverns of Time, and even Area 52.

We are receiving some information that some people may be trying to exploit this situation.  Make no mistake about it, anyone who attempts to exploit this will be treated harshly.  We are not going to play around with people who make falsehoods or imply the possibility of other free items.

We give fair warning.  We expect people to behave respectfully toward the citizens of this community, and those people who imply this will be treated with all of the severity that we have in our court system.

Thank you.

CYNRA: The authorities in Stormwind trying to maintain the peace during this unexpected rush of people.  It’s been promised that people who fail to adhere to the rules outlined by King Wrynn will be dealt with harshly.

This is a picture of the scene earlier this evening, just before Wrynn made his announcement.  As you can see, the numbers within the Champions’ Hall is shockingly high.  So far, fortunately, it appears that no one has been injured despite the numbers present there.

We want to go back out to Stormwind now.  Airee.net’s Csilla Kovács is currently at the scene.  Csilla, update us on what you’re seeing out there at the Champions’ Hall this evening.

CSILLA KOVÁCS, AIREE.NET CORRESPONDENT: Miss Cyn, ya’ve got it ’bout right.  There’s a whole mess o’ people here, an’ it ain’t jes’ the one tha’ can wear them gear tha’s here.  Got us some fellahs who’ve been tellin’ us tha’ other’n seein’ more bodies’n they’ve ever seen afore at this here Hall o’ Champions, they’re seein’ a lot more priests’n should be here.  Y’should look here at this here chart they’ve made showin’ the number o’ priests is increasin’.

They’s sayin’ there’s an equal number o’ warlock t’ be found, but with the number o’ people here, it ain’t easy t’ see it myself, y’know?  ‘Cause there’s so many people here!

All ’round here there’s people fightin’ an’ shovin’ an’ sayin’ they wants t’ get t’ them vendors who’ve got themselves so loot t’ be shared.  Sad t’ be said, but ain’t everyone here listenin’ t’ wha’ mister King Wrynn, sir, said earlier, ’cause it’s hard t’ see the vendors at all, much less t’ be talkin’ t’ them.  Even now ya can hear the shouts o’ them fellahs as they push t’ get closer while those at the fellah hisself stay right put.

We’ve learned some o’ wha’ has happened in the press conference ya jes’ heard.  The biggest question, though, tha’ ain’t answered at this point is why this all is happenin’.

I tried t’ talk t’ one o’ them fellahs tha’ started this whole mess earlier when I spoke with tha’ Captain Dirgehammer fellah, but it didn’t do me no good.  Fellah didn’t say a single word t’ me, though he did try t’ shove a whole lot o’ stuffs into my hand.  By the time I’d been push out o’ the way by some really mean-like fellahs, I’d had in my hands some Merciless Gladiator’s Mooncloth Gloves, Merciless Gladiator’s Mooncloth Hood, Merciless Gladiator’s Mooncloth Leggings, Merciless Gladiator’s Mooncloth Mantle, an’ Merciless Gladiator’s Mooncloth Robes.  Tried t’ tell mister Dirgehammer tha’ I had me the whole lot already from fightin’, but he ain’t a fellah t’ take no fer an answer.

Even worse, though, is the fackt tha’ there’re rumors them Horde fellahs is gettin’ the same sort of treatment this evenin’ in the Orgrimmar.  Supposedly them fellahs in the Hall o’ Legends is havin’ themselves a hard time, too, as their vendors is givin’ out armor fer free as well. It’s ‘nough t’ make this here gel’s head turn, right it does!

This is Csilla Kovács, still standin’ ’round here in Stormwind, ‘course.  Back t’ ya, miss Cyn.

CYNRA: Thank you, Csilla.  It appears the events on the Champions’ Hall wll continue through the night until the vendors there complete their business.  It’s been suggested that the people standing there be forcibly removed, but that suggestion was discarded for fear of rioting.

It is interesting to note that while the excitement generated in the Champions’ Hall proceeds , the attacks on the newly restored Stormwind Harbor continue unabated.  The Scourge’s efforts are almost entirely disregarded, with only a small handful of brave soldiers faring against the waves frost wyrms that continue their assalt in the defenders’ absence.  This has given some speculation that the events that have occured in Stormwind this evening are not an example of the genorostiy of the vendors in the Champions’ Hall but instead part of some nefarious plot concocted by the Lich King, former prince Arthas Menethil.  We will see in upcoming days what will when entail.

This is Cynra of Airee.net signing off.

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Select Realms Active with the Rest to Follow

General 1 comment.

Following a spotty at best attempt at keeping the clamoring masses updated, a number of realms just became active in World of Warcraft.  The culprit of today’s extended service period seems to be a bug regarding in-game mail.  According to US World of Warcraft forums Community Manager Zarhym in “In-game Mails“:

We wanted to inform our players regarding today’s extended maintenance. We experienced an error that resulted in players being unable to retrieve in-game mail from the last 15 days. Once the error was discovered, we brought down the realms immediately and began working to address this problem, and have been doing so for the duration of the day. Our decision was to enable players to continue playing World of Warcraft before the opening of Wrath of the Lich King. Work would continue on addressing issues with the in-game mail while the realms were up. This is the plan that is currently in motion.

The process from this point forward will be twofold:

1. All items that were in a mail will be sent to characters in one or more messages depending on the amount of items the character had in the mail system.
2. Gold from auction house sales or sent through mail will be sent in a separate mail.

We are working to resolve this issue, and we will keep our players informed throughout this process. In the meantime, please do not create an in-game ticket or contact phone support for this issue – multiple mails will be sent returning your items and gold automatically. We greatly appreciate your patience during this time.

While I understand and appreciate the effort made by the staff of Blizzard in trying to rectify this problem — especially before the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion — I really do feel that Blizzard had dropped the ball again in keeping people informed of their efforts and why the extended maintenance had occurred.  This lack of information was compounded by the fact that the official forums are typically down during the weekly scheduled maintenance.  As a result, a further disconnect resulted in which the last word heard by Blizzard was that the servers were expected to be up two hours after their final in-game notice.

That message was posted nearly seven hours ago.

In an attempt to help alleviate this problem, Blizzard decided to make select forums read-only so that information could be shared with the World of Warcraft community.  In “Select Forums Read-Only,” Zarhym further stated:

To improve accessibility, select forums on the official World of Warcraft forums will be temporarily switched over to read-only mode. While we would like to make every effort to ensure the forums allow the community to interact with each other, the current situation does not allow players to communicate with each other, or allow Blizzard to relay information to the community. Thus, some forums will be available as read-only to allow us to share information with the public. We hope that we can keep this to a minimum and revert the forums to full functionality as soon as possible.

A little slow perhaps, but a feature like this in the future would help relay reliable information to the company’s consumers rather than having to rely on what limited information in shared on the game’s “Breaking News” box.  In fact, I’d love to see this become a staple policy each Tuesday when maintenance is performed.

Here’s hoping that your servers¹ are up soon!

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A Different Way of Preparing for Wrath of the Lich King

General, Lore 3 comments.

While I’ve been frantically checking every fifteen minutes to see if the servers are back up¹, the significant other has decided to get ready for the imminent release of the second World of Warcraft expansion in an entirely different way.  He took the opportunity this afternoon to reinstall his copies of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and Warcraft III: Frozen Throne and has been gleefully slaughtering Scourge minions.  Since our computers are in the same room, I’ve been reliving the experience vicariously through him.

In between bouts of cursing at the server’s damnable reticence and goading on the significant other in his fight against the Scourge², I started thinking about how this really was a wonderful way of preparing for the expansion.  This Thursday Wrath of the Lich King will become available to World of Warcraft players and features the next phase of the campaign against the forces of the Scourge.  The events that we will see in upcoming months were precipitated years ago in the Warcraft III game and its expansion.  Now is a wonderful opportunity to review the history of those games in order to have a better understanding of what will happen in Wrath of the Lich King.

In particular, I’ve been looking forward to the Reign of Chaos campaign “The Culling.”  Prior to this campaign, Arthas Menethil has realized that the Scourge are spreading the plague through infected grain carried in caravans that are being delivered to various towns, cities, and settlements throughout the Lordaeron kingdom.  Following this discovery, the young prince is reuinited with Uther the Lightbringer, his mentor, and their forces make their way to Stratholme.  When Arthas learns that the grain has already arrived in the city and has been disseminated to the populace, he orders Uther to take his forces and purge the city of its inhabitants — both living and undead.  Uther refuses and, maddened by this seeming betrayal by his closest friend, Arthas disbands disbands the Knights of the Silver Hand and undertakes the gruesome task himself.

In the Wrath of the Lich King, players will be able to exprience this pivotal event from Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos in the Caverns of Time instance The Culling of Stratholme.  Players will watch the exchange between Arthas, Uther, and Jaina, and then be tasked to help the Prince in preventing Mal’Ganis from acquiring more slaves of the Scourge in the people’s death.  They’ll fight through waves of undead, make their way through the city, and then take on the mastermind behind the corruption of Stratholme, the nathrezim Mal’Ganis.

And this is just one example of where the lore of the previous games will collide with the future expansion!

Want to bone up on your lore for Wrath of the Lich King?  Consider perusing the following links:

• Blizzard’s “Death Knight Lore,”
• The story “Rise of the Lich King,”
• “Know Your Lore: Preparing for Wrath of the Lich King” at WoW Insider
• Articles tagged as Lore on WotLKWiki, and of course
• WoWWiki’s Wrath of the Lich King article, which spawns multiple links to other related topics.

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Immortalized Through FigurePrints

Eszti, General, Teca 7 comments.

FigurePrints is a company that came up with an interesting idea a few years back.  It provided World of Warcraft players with the opportunity to immortalize their characters by creating one of a kind statues that rely on information from the Armory to create.  According to their website:

FigurePrints are one-of-a-kind, custom statues of your World of Warcraft® characters created using high-tech 3D color printing machines. Our artists pull your character from the virtual world and bring it to life.

Status are printed, relying on equipment capable of taking three-dimensional models from the computer and then created layer by layer.  People who have worked in any of several technology industries — particularly those that deal heavily with prototypes — may be familiar with the equipment.  I’ve personally seen machines like that twice and was fascinated by the shapes the evolved as each layer was carefully and precisely added with machine efficiency.

FigurePrints are unique in that you can’t just place an order to acquire one.  Due to the popularity of the company’s service and the limited amount that its eleven employees are capable of producing each much¹, customers are chosen by lottery each month from a pool of interested individuals.  Out of the pool of potentially over 25,000, up to 1,400 win the right to have their characters immortalized through the FigurePrints process.

Original prints were met with an underwhelming success, as many customers complained about the dull appearance of their characters or even paint entirely missing from the models in splotches.²   This appears to have been somewhat rectified over the past year, though this increase in quality — or the number of statues that were sent back due to defects or damage — has resulted in a thirty dollar increase from the original price tag, resulting in a 130USD price tag.

When I learned of FigurePrints over a year ago, I quickly jumped on the bandwagon with many other World of Warcraft players and eagerly waited for the email that would announce that I was selected to create my characters on their site.  And waited.  And waited.  And waited some more.  After reading about the many problems people had had with their company³, seeing the price increase, and then still not having received an email, my interest in having one waned.  Compounded with the fact that I rarely check the email I signed up with due to the overwhelming amount of spam that has inundated it in recent months, I was rarely reminded of the fact that I had once expressed interest in having one created.

Until I received this in my mail last month:

I find my interest piqued again.  The best part of having finally received this email is that I get to play with their website and see the possible results of my efforts  And, despite having acquired all of Tiers 4 and 5 for a handful of my characters, I find that I’m outfitting them in their normal, everyday outfits because that’s what really suits them.  In other words, there’s not an epic — and, in most cases, not even a rare — to be found on my girls.

I have a few more that I would like to test, but the Armory is being finicky and I can’t properly view the gear that the characters are wearing.  So, at the moment, I’m left trying to consider if I want to spend the money for my girls⁴ or if I’ll just spend my time playing with the creator.  The overwhelming word has been that these statues aren’t worth it, but I’m having fun imagining what it would be like to have a miniature Eszti on my desk!

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Sparking a Change or Two

General, Rahel, Teca 6 comments.

It’s been a couple of days since I last posted and quite a few things have attributed to that. I’ve been working on a project for a friend, trying to work with two friends to do another project that may be related to this site, have been attempting to gird myself for NaNoWriMo with a close friend breathing heavily down on me so that I’ll mindlessly pursue my goal and he can read the results, and working on a variety of alts. For one, Rahel Isera’duna — my cantankerous priestess and former Discipline doll — has fully embraced the dark side of the priestly trees and emerged as a Shadow priestess.

The decision was the only viable one left to me, since I’d forsaken Holy for Discipline with the perky priestess and couldn’t condone having a Holy priest again since the class didn’t appeal to my playstyle.  Having two Discipline priests seemed sillier than my earlier decision to have not one but two healing priests, even though their specs and intended functions originally set them apart.  This was a big step for me, since I hadn’t played a Shadow-specced priest beyond thirty since those naive pre-The Burning Crusade days.  It’s surprisingly been a lot more fun that I recall and the new changes that have occurred since¹ make the return to Shadow much more intriguing.

Like many people, I finally settled on a 5/0/56 raiding build that seems to be very popular at the moment.  It’s worked very well for me thus far, though I am trying to decide on how much benefit there is to be gained from Improved Shadowform.  In a way, it seems more like an improved version of Fade rather than an actual viable talent to acquire, and those remaining two points might be better spent on talents like Improved Power Word: Fortitude or picking up two points in Improved Inner Fire for when Rahel reaches 71 and the spell increases Spell Power in addition to Armor.  I go back and forth on the issue, since I don’t know if I could train myself to use Fade enough to make the talent worthwhile, but can see the benefit of it in raid scenarios where splash damage tends to run rampant.

I’ve been letting the matter mull in my head while I work on yet another alt, my draenei warrior and former Vindicator Teca e’Veritas.  She had managed to reach the vaulted status of 50 prior to Patch 3.0.2, though I had managed to work up the gumption to play her a handful of times in recent months.  However, the changes that made soloing as a Protection warrior more viable intrigued me and I took the opportunity to gleefully return to the Protection tree from my prior Fury build.  She’s currently 0/0/43 and I’m floored by how much fun I’ve been having playing a Protection warrior.  When I had first begin leveling Teca, I had attempted to do so using some horrible Fury-Protection hybrid that I’m almost ashamed to admit that I test, but as fun as it was to gather up a bunch of enemies, I found it frustrating to spend a singnificant amount of time trying to wear them down.  Post-Echoes of Doom, however, it’s been beyond enjoyable to multi-tank targets for quests; I gleefully round up a group and tear into the with surprising ease.

I think that I’ll enjoy leveling my warrior prior to the expansion.

Regarding Politics

Today we held our elections within the United States, including the presidential elections.  The results are out and there’s a lot to be said regarding the changes, but I’ll borrow a bit from the “Autobiography of Mark Twain” in saying:

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

That said, I’m certain that for many of you your servers’ global channels were full of posts regarding today’s elections — just as they were on the Feathermoon US roleplaying server today and in previous weeks.  While some of the discussion was actually quite interesting and engaging, most of it was just mindless babble from unwashed masses that really served little purpose other than incite others.²  I, for one, am glad that the elections are over because it might mean that Trade and General can return to some semblence of normalcy.

There were, however a number of noteworthy quotes that I managed to capture this evening just before the results were announced!

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