And the comic contest winner for February, 2007, is... Nichos < Collision Force >! Congratulations! Remember, this contest will go on all year long, so you will have a new chance to win a Blizzard Edition iPod Nano every month. Keep those comics coming, and you might be next! Stop by each week to see a new comic from the contest. Also, check out all of the February comics.
Community News - 5:22 PM PST | Posted By: the traveler
Cake, for the horde! On a different forum three incredible pictures of a Horde cake were posted. You can see all three images at Flicker by clicking here. The name of the birthday person was blurred in the image by the uploader.
This cake, including the woodgrain, is edible. The lettering was done with FDA approved food gel coloring cut with vodka so it could be painted one. The metallic icing was done with something called "special luster dust" and also cut with vodka. Everything is FDA approved.
Detto NateBlast, goblin tinkerer extraordinaire from Fileplanet has compiled the first part of an ongoing guide to introduce and instruct on how to use World of Warcraft interface modifications (UI mods). Head over to Fileplanet and Detto's guide by clicking here, and don't forget to also visit our very own UI & Macro forumfor discussions on using and developing UI mods.
Here on the WoW EU forums, Ommra informed everyone that almost all the Paladin changes have been removed from the current PTR patch notes. The only changes left for Paladins are below.
Paladin The slowing affect from "Avenger's Shield" is now considered a snare, so snare removal and immunity affects will now work on it.
You can view the entire list of PTR Patch Notes here.
William Brinkman has a wonderful new article available at the official WoW:TCG website. He realizes that no matter how powerful a deck you build you can't take the human element out of the game. Being aware of the human element and how you can use it to your advantage can improve the number of wins you have.
It’s back to the drawing board. Re-humbled, you must go on a quest to learn more.
There was a point when I thought I had an entire Draft format mastered, only to learn that too much confidence made me shortsighted and unable to see the big picture. I was predictable and my opponents knew it. It’s then that I went to a good friend and asked for his advice. He opened my eyes to totally new strategies, bluffs, and general play to tighten up my game. See, I’m a pretty emotional person. Many times, my opponents could read my feelings and know exactly where I sat. That’s why my bluffs weren’t working! The people you play with consistently can be incredibly insightful about your shortcomings as a player, and can help you tweak your game to bring it to the next level.
You can have the best decklist in the world and still 0-3. Players can take the same decklists I write about every week but have very different results. There’s a luck factor you’ll never overcome, but there are things you can do in your game to reduce that luck and take control of the game. The greatest lesson my old friends impressed upon me is that the moment you think you’re good, that’s when you plateau and flatline. Always remember that there’s more to learn—especially in an ever-changing game like a TCG—and you need to adapt.
Jason Grabher-Meyer provides a lot of good information on how to prepare for the upcoming regionals in his new article at the official WoW:TCG website. He also shows how the casual player can benefit just as much as the hardcore player by going to a regional.
...But Regionals aren’t just for seriously ambitious players. They’re much bigger than your average weekend tourney, so you’ll get to meet a lot of people from all over. There are plenty of side events (including Lazy Peon Challenges), and barring an even bigger event like a Darkmoon Faire, you’ll never find a better place to do some serious trading. If your primary interest is meeting more World of Warcraft TCG fans (whether it’s to make new friends or to beef up your collection), Regionals are a great opportunity.
Paladins used to be able to use Avenging Wrath and Divine Shield at the same time. This was a bug, and it will get fixed in the next patch. Avenging Wrath and Divine Shield will then share the same cooldown as it was intended.
General Europe News - 7:05 AM PST | Posted By: Dramora
Ommra reported this on the Europe Forums. Have a look and submit your reviews.
Schwick has a new side project to Warcraft Weekly; the Community Review. Every week all players are invited to review a certain topic. This weeks the topics are Engineering, Tailoring and Dungeon set 3, Tier 4 & Tier 5 . Say your meaning here: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=192049321&sid=1
Also remember to nominate fun and/or interesting threads for Forum Watch! The links will be published in Warcraft Weekly, and maybe also on our homepage. If you see something of interest, post it here: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=192049426&sid=1
These threads will be on the Community Events % News forum, so keep that in mind and have a look for the new threads on Tuesdays!
Another week and the first of two comics has been posted over at Looking for Group Comic. Follow the misadventures of Cale, Gid, Crunch and Richard as they make their way to their goal.
Please join us on Wednesday, February 28, 2007, for a House of Commons with the developers of PlanetSide at 4:00 PM Pacific / 7:00 PM Eastern in the #StraticsHoC channel on Stratics IRC.
You can connect to one of our IRC servers through the use of your favorite IRC client or you can visit our new Downloads section to choose a suitable client. Connect to irc.stratics.com port 6668 or whichever server is closest to you:
stratics.frws.com port 6668, USA - Colorado
irc.glowfish.de port 6668, EU - Germany
stratics.afraidyet.net 6668, USA - Atlanta
You may also connect through our handy Java link which may be found right here. You must have Java installed to use this which can be downloaded from the Java homepage.
We will be discussing the new Combat Engineering weaponry with the developers, and general chat will be in our IRC channel #planetside before, during, and after the House of Commons.!
Jeremy Blair continues the Head of the Class series today at the official WoW:TCG website. Today he looks at the priest class both in the online game and in the card game.
Prologue
Bells toll in the distance. Foreshadowing. Dusk slips to darkness and a shroud of dense, wet fog drifts slowly across the ground. It creeps up and over the once-familiar sights that offered comfort before the nightfall. Opaque forms shift, replacing the day-lit trees. The distant mountains are eclipsed and your eyes squint, searching for a stronghold. Uncertainty arises as your feet begin to shuffle while navigating an arid, rocky path. You smell copper, and fight off a stinging taste that drowns out the normality present before your throat began to close. Your muscles tense and then uncontrollably release. You forfeit your hands, you lose your legs, and your will slowly fades. The last glimmer of light is overtaken by black, and you feel the cool, wet air pulling you toward a decision. Your mind submits to anxiety, and that warm, dangerous feeling slides up the small of your back and across your shoulders to scratch the nape of your neck. Your pulse quickens. Frozen, you are a statue to this dark world. You knew this would not be easy, but you never thought you would be overcome so absolutely. Your faith misplaced, your mind belongs to the priest.
The ‘cost’ of sockets on an item currently scales slightly with item quality, meaning the higher the quality an item the more a socket will account for. In an upcoming content patch though we’re standardising the cost of sockets on high end items to match the lower end items. This in turn directly results in a base stat increase for the higher quality items, which will be seen in that same patch.
Our item designers are also going to be taking passes on all expansion raid sets and other additional changes may be seen in upcoming patches. It’s not our intention for higher tiers of raid armour to be worse or side-grades to previous sets. While in some cases they may not always have the specific stat that some may prefer the intent is that the overall item quality is indeed higher with each new raid tier.
WoW:TCG Europe posted the following information regarding the upcoming regionals and dates. The dates page, available here, covers events from March until August of 2007.
More and more Regional Championships are being planned, all confirmed events will be announced on our tournament page.
During each of these Regional Events, the following prize support will be handed out: - Top 16 players will receive an extended art card of Arcanite Reaper. - The Top 8 will get a choice of an Alliance of a Horde Playmat. - Top 4 will be invited to the Belgian National Championship (date & location to be confirmed) And there will of course also be many Heroes of Azeroth boosters!
Invitation policy: • Only players that are resident or carry the country’s nationality on the date of the Regional Championship Tournament are eligible to receive an invitation for that country’s National Championship. • Players can only participate in one National Championship: if a player is eligible for more Championships he/she must choose one. Participation in a National Championship automatically cancels any other outstanding National Championship invitation that the player may have. (This invitation does not pass down). • In case a player receives a 2nd invitation for the same National Championship this invitation will automatically be passed down to the next eligible player according to the final standings of that Regional Championship Tournament. • All invitations are non-transferable.
As soon as the first names are known, a list will be started and updated on this website!
On the day of the Regional you will also be able to participate in a Lazy Peon challenge. in this tournament, only common and uncommon cards are allowed. All other rules apply as normal. Top 8 of these events will receive an extended art "Frost Shock" card.
This article was posted at MMORPG.net:World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade has gone well on its way to paying off its development costs already by selling over a million copies in the first month in the US alone. Voodoo Extreme explain that the origional, and the burning crusade + special edition take up the top three slots on the US monthly chart. It doesn't seem that the delays did it much harm at all.
1,225,170 copies of Burning Crusade were sold in the U.S. in January and a further 123,789 copies of standard Warcraft were sold too, allowing Blizzard to take the top three slots in the monthly game chart.That's quite an impressive record for TBC, and I'm pretty certain more will be broken in the future.
Developer Comments - 6:47 AM PST | Posted By: Kayhynn
In this thread here, Apokteinos inquires as to what the heck happened to warlock's imps.
I used him occasionally for some "free" DPS, which lasted all of 15 seconds. Now there is no reason to bring him out of Phase Shift, ever, because his +stam buff is better than whatever DPS he can contribute.
I'd just like to hear the logic. I mean, any Lock can tell you that the reason why the Imp was bugged was primarily because of the bugged Demonology talents -- Unholy Power and Demonic Knowledge -- so why did you have to lower the Imp's coefficient AND nerf Improved Fireball as well?
At +500-ish shadow damage, my imp was doing pretty paltry DPS -- maybe 250-ish per hit? I don't find a problem with that, seeing as even someone 5 levels below me can one-shot him.
So I'm not asking you to change it back. I just want to know what motivated these changes, seeing as the problem could have been fixed without this scale of an impact on marginal, situational DPS. I personally don't mind the nerf that much, from a gameplay perspective -- since it's on the scale of nerfing Firestone or Health Funnel or Aftermath -- but because it's the nerf of something fairly useless into something completely useless, I am just utterly confused as to why someone decided to take the time to code such a waste of time into the game.
There are a few replies from Tseric in the thread, the most recent one gives us the following answer:
The spell damage coefficients have been reapplied to the imp, but they are obviously lower than before.
In regard to the improved firebolt, this was a design change that was backlogged for a while because of the nature of the casting time.
This talent has not been working correctly for a long time for a basic reason. The game simply doesn't recognize the ability to reduce this casting time below 1.5 seconds. It's a tech limitation that imposes a barrier at 1.5 second cast time. The talent was originally coded to reduce casting to less than 1.5 seconds and the game basically gets confused, which is why the first point worked, but the second point didn't apply the appropriate reduction. At this time, we can't change the mechanics to support a reduction to a 1 second cast time, so the talented reduction was changed from .5 seconds per point, to .25 seconds per point. So, at the least, the second talent point has an effect, rather than doing almost nothing at all. Yes, it is something of a workaround fix, but we're limited in our options to make the talent work as originally designed.
So here's hoping my own Imp will be a bit more worthwhile in the near future.
Hello and welcome to the third installment of my weekly column for TCGplayer.com, and let me just say that today you will be presented with something very special. What I have prepared for you below is the transcript of an interview that I was able to conduct during the week with fellow �On the Bubble� team member and friend Conor Holmes. This was the man who originally introduced me to WoW TCG and I am not lying when I tell you that he is an amazingly talented gamer. Currently he is Northern Ireland's highest rated player for Magic: the Gathering (despite the fact that he never plays constructed Magic because he loathes the format) and has thus far qualified for 3 Pro Tours and participated in one. His skill in the limited formats is unparalleled and I personally have only seen him lose a grand total of two matches in WoW draft: one was to the unsinkable Scott Hunstad and the other was to me (bringing my record against him to an awesome 1-4). He is also the only person I know who was able to qualify for a VS System PC without having ever played the game before.
Don't forget to drop by Looking for Group Comic on Monday's and Thursday's to follow the adventures of Richard, Gid, Cale, and Crunch. Sohmer and Lars keep us entertained with their style of humor. So be sure to check them out!
Patrick Swift the OP Support Team Manager for Upper Deck Entertainment posted the following on the UDE WoW:TCG boards.
Hey folks,
I wanted to touch base with everyone regarding a couple things for the UDE Points store.
First, on Wednesday we shipped all the Yeti Token that we had full shipping information for. There are still alot with missing names, addresses or zip codes so we're going to have to go through and contact people to fill in the missing information. You can be proactive by e-mailing ude@upperdeck.com and providing: your order number, full name and full address. Make sure you put Attn UDE Points/Yeti token order in the subject line.
We had some problems adding all the tracking info to accounts so it will be some time until you can rely on your account to tell you whether or not your order has shipped.
Second, some users are still experiencing problems with the store holding their address information. I believe this is related to being under 13 (in the US) or under 18 (internationally). Our website cannot keep contact information for minors by law. our Digital department has told me they are working on a workaround for this but I don't have an ETA on when it will be completed. I'll update you next week.
We have sold out of our first batch of Yeti tokens. We will have another small batch in about two weeks but then we'll have to wait on a reprint. Treasure Packs have been selling quickly and I expect that we'll sell out soon.
You'll be seeing more VS System items going up soon, since with the current release of Marvel Team Up it is part of the UDE Points program as well. Up next for the WoW TCg are Dwarf tokens and the Onyxia playmats. Expect those late March or early April.
That's it for this week,
Patrick Swift OP Support Team Manager Upper Deck Entertainment
65 Undead Warlock 29 Troll Hunter
He later added the following in regards to a question about tracking shipments.
No one's accounts have been updated with the tracking information. We have shipped about 20% of the token orders. Surprisingly one of the most often missed pieces of info is the full name...which is specifically required when we want tracking for international shipments.
Word from our digital department is that we'll be able to start updating accounts with tracking info next Monday.
UDE has announced that August 2007 will see the release of the Fires of Outland booster packs.
Rush to war as the conflict is joined in Outland! The armies of Azeroth lay siege to the mysterious world, while the Burning Legion throws its might against the Stair of Destiny.
Prestige and glory await those who are bold enough to join the fray. Let your battle cry be heard as echoes of war engulf the blood-soaked world.
Heed the call!Fires of Outland™ is the third set in the World of Warcraft® Trading Card Game, which is based upon the award-winning massively multiplayer online role playing game, World of Warcraft®.
Key Features:
Uniquely coded rare Loot™ cards feature cosmetic upgrades for your World of Warcraft online character. New Burning Crusade content now available!
Collect UDE Points cards with unique codes in every pack of the World of Warcraft® TCG. Enter those codes on your online account and earn special TCG cards, promotional materials, and distinct cosmetic upgrades for your online World of Warcraft® character!
Play as your favorite class and race, including the new Draenei and Blood Elf races, and experience all the depth of World of Warcraft® in a TCG!
Compete in Darkmoon Faire and other robust World of Warcraft® TCG Organized Play programs and win amazing prizes
Brian Kibler is continuing his Secret Series at the official WoW: TCG website. This time he takes a look at Horde Paladins and Alliance Shamans. He does a great job of explaining how each faction obtained the new class and how the cards will work in the upcoming TCG expansion.
The most central feature of the World of Warcraft TCG is the hero card. Not only does your hero card represent you on the battlefield—the way you attack, defend, and suit up with weapons and armor—but it also determines what cards you’re allowed to play in your deck. An Alliance deck can’t play Horde allies, a Mage deck can’t play Rogue abilities, and a Fire Mage can’t play Frost talents. What this means is that the new heroes in each set unlock combinations that could not have existed before, be they race/class, talent/faction, or race/talent.
The most significant of these new combinations in Through the Dark Portal are, of course, the new classes for each faction. For those of you who aren’t well versed in the online game, The Burning Crusade expansion made the paladin and shaman classes available to both factions for the first time—previously, only the Alliance had paladins and only the Horde had shamans. This division was the source of much debate as to which faction got the better end of the deal, but in the end, cries of imbalance were put to rest by the introduction of the blood elves and the draenei.
The explanations for why blood elves can be paladins and draenei can be shaman are very cool.
Blizzplanet: Tides of Darkness Q&A with Aaron Rosenberg
Community News - 3:35 AM PST | Posted By: Lady Beth
BlizzPlanet recently had a Q&A session with Aaron Rosenberg author of World of Warcraft: Tide of Darkness which is coming out August 28, 2007. Here is a snippet of the Q&A:
Medievaldragon: The first question about your new novel is, What characters can we expect to see in this new book?
AaronR: There may be a few too many to list quickly. :) Well, it centers on Lothar and Khadgar over on the Alliance side, and Orgrimm and Gul'dan on the Horde side. Turalyon plays a major part as well, of course.
Medievaldragon: What timeframes in the Warcraft timeline are covered in World of Warcraft: Tides of Darkness?
AaronR: The book follows the events of the war, from the time the Stormwind refugees reach Lordaeron to the end of the conflict. I won't give away who wins, in case anyone doesn't know. :)
Tim Willoughby is back with another great article in his Quest Log series at the official WoW:TCG website. This time Tim takes a look at the Sealed Pack style of play and how to have a great time with it.
I’ve been messing around with Sealed Pack formats recently. These are a great way to play if you have limited access to cards because they put everyone on a level playing field. Also, these “limited” formats are great ways to learn more about cards that you might not immediately try in Constructed decks. Thus far, the WoW TCG has been packed with more powerful commons than your average peasant uprising. The obviously incredible ones, like Parvink, made it straight into my “going to play this a lot in Constructed” pile, and the little Gnome Warrior is likely not moving out before global warming allows me to ride a camel to work. Or maybe a zebra. You get the idea.
The interesting thing about Sealed Pack play for me is the cards that at the first instance might look a little weak but then go up in value once you learn a little more about them. I know that a lot of people initially looked at healing as being a little weak because it only forestalls your defeat rather than actively winning you the game. It has turned out, though, that there are various choice healing effects that are well worth consideration. The way that damage accumulates on allies allows for healing spells to act as board control as well as a way of staying in the game.
Onyxia’s Lair Tournament Edition treasure packs are now available in the UDE Points Store. Each pack will contain ten cards from the Onyxia’s Lair Raid Deck release. The Tournament Edition packs are non-foil versions of the treasure pack cards, and they will not include randomly inserted Loot cards. Each pack will cost 4,000 points, and customers will be limited to two packs per account for this first wave. This is to ensure that more people will have a chance to order some packs.
Upper Deck Entertainment has revealed the Onyxia playmat that will be available in April. This will be a limited time item so be ready to grab one as soon as it becomes available.
In Nagrand the is a deliciously evil quest that includes a goblin trampoline and a nest of eggs. People wind up dead and its not because there is an LvL 66 elite Roc at the end. In fact you're more likely to notice the bones of those before you before you even notice the goblin with the gold !standing on the hill.
This is how you become the envy of of those around you trying to complete the quest.
Step one, get the key. (killing the dust tornado things, easy)
Step two, line yourself up in the middle of the jump o thingy as shown below facing in the direction of the arrow.
Step three, use the tramp and keep your camera above you the whole time. Keep your mouse over the slow fall buff when you are directly over the nest, right click to remove the buff.
If you timed it right you should fall just like i did here and land right in the nest.
You most likely will die several times before getting it right unless you are a rogue like myself, and/or have a decrease in falling damage.
Tip: heal first before grabbing the egg and bring friends
William Brinkman brings us another great article over at the official WoW: TCG website.
In the TCG, Druids have tons of amazing abilities. Their epic armor, Stormrage Cover, is one of my favorite treasure cards from the Onyxia’s Lair Raid Deck and potentially sets the class up to own the Constructed formats when the next set arrives. Druids are more popular these days, as people become more familiar with the sets and seek answers to the questions asked by the Constructed scene. It’s easy to get lost in this class with the bevy of options at its disposal. How does one find his or her way in the crazy world of the master jack-of-all-trades?
Do you want to play aggressively? Funny, because it’s the Restoration Druid that has the most robust aggressive strategy. While it may not be as quick as Thangal’s potential draws, Moonshadow has a less risky beatdown strategy available, and it’s that consistency that I’ll emphasize today.
Community News - 4:38 PM PST | Posted By: Lady Beth
WoW Insider had an interesting "Breakfast Topic" today on playing WoW at work. Is this something you have been able to acomplish yet? Mike Schramm hasn't. Here is a snippet of his article.
I've heard people do it, but personally I couldn't imagine how I'd pull it off. Most of my workday (when I'm not slaving away for the Weblogs, Inc. overlords here) is spent in an open office, and so even if I did find the time to squeeze a little adventuring in between my actual work, I have so many people looking over my shoulder that I'd get caught before long. Of course, when I am supposed to be writing for this site, I'm usually playing WoW anyway, so that evens out, I suppose.
Ben Drago has announced at the Upper Deck WoW:TCG forum that there is an Extended Art Leeroy Jenkins card that will be given to judges at the National Championships.
These match the eight cards donated to Player's Charity for auction last year.
Community News - 3:54 PM PST | Posted By: Lady Beth
The famous YouTube is holding a WoW video contest in which you can win an awesome gaming machine with a Intel® Core™2 Extreme quad-core processor. (Say that three times fast. )
One of our reporters, The Traveler, recently had the opportunity to chat with Dan Bojanowski, the WoW TCG Product Manager regarding the WoW TCG.
Stratics: When Through The Dark Portal is released will we see the Heroes of Azeroth sets removed from store shelves? DB – Heroes of Azeroth is a base set for the WOW TCG and has many staple cards with recognizable in-game spells and characters. We want this product to be available to new players that begin playing the WOW TCG anytime within the first year. Also, for certain types of tournaments, Heroes of Azeroth booster packs will be used in addition to Through the Dark Portal booster packs. As such, we have printed what we feel is an appropriate amount of product to remain on retail shelves well beyond the release of Through the Dark Portal.
Stratics: At the sneak preview events for The Dark Portal on March 31st and April 1st will players be able to acquire starters and boosters? DB– Yes, in limited quantities. Anyone that enters these Sneak Preview tournaments will be given some booster packs which they will use to construct their deck. There will be extra booster packs awarded to top finishers for these tournaments. Additionally, special prizes will be available which may include promo cards, deck tins, play mats and t-shirts (prizes still being finalized). If you can’t make it to a Sneak Preview tournament, be sure to look for Release Celebration tournaments on April 14-15 for more chances to win exclusive prizes.
Stratics: Will there be a sneak preview event for Molten Core raid deck as well? DB – No, Sneak Previews in general are only done for booster/starter launches.
Stratics: For the Onyxia Raid deck, will you make ever make the hero cards smaller or just large ones? This also applies to the upcoming Molton Core Raid deck which will be released in 2007. DB– Yes, we do plan on printing all three copies of the Onyxia hero card in normal card size. They will likely be available through the UDE Points Store. The same will probably be true for Molten Core Raid Deck.
Stratics: When Heroes of Azeroth hit store shelves it sold out pretty quick. Will there be more sets of Through The Dark Portal made available at release time than there were for Heroes of Azeroth? DB – In short, yes. When we printed Heroes of Azeroth the first time, it was based on pre-orders and estimated demand. As you noted, it sold out very quickly. We were super excited about this, and immediately went back on press and got more Heroes of Azeroth on store shelves by early December. For Through the Dark Portal, we will print what we feel is an appropriate amount, based on pre-orders and our knowledge of the market. Now that retailers and distributors have seen the customer’s response to WOW TCG, the supply should become more in line with the demand.
Stratics: Are there plans to release pre-constructed decks for game play? DB – Every starter decks come with a 33-card preconstructed deck. While this is not a big enough deck to take to a sanctioned tournament, it provides players with a basis for building a solid deck. In the Heroes of Azeroth starters, there were nine different pre-constructed decks (one for each of the classes). There will be nine NEW pre-constructed decks in the Through the Dark Portal starters.
Stratics: Are there plans to release clothing featuring artwork from the cards? DB – We will not be doing a full line of clothing, but we will create t-shirts with card art that will be used as prizes through our Organized Play programs.
Stratics: Do you know of any new items that will be added for in-game rewards? DB – Yes, lots. :)
Stratics: Any chance we will see codes made available as loot in World of Warcraft that can be exchanged for card products? DB – Hmm… interesting. There are no plans for anything like this right now.
Stratics: What's your favorite card and why? DB – Rise to the Challenge – While this is not the most competitive of cards, it is definitely very flavorful and fun. In the MMO, there is such satisfaction when you level up. I feel that this card does a fantastic job of bringing that feeling to the TCG. It takes a LONG time to pull it off, but when you do, the rewards are great!
This is also permanently located here, as well as on our left side menu under INTERVIEWS.
Jason Grabher-Meyer has a new article available from his Starting From Scratch series at the official WoW: TCG website.
One of the most common terms you’ll hear in casual TCG discussion is “tech.” People talk about it and develop it, and it can make the difference between winning and losing. It turns bad matchups into good matchups, and can create completely unpredictable and surprising comeback situations. So just what is it, anyway?
This one takes a second, but I promise it’ll be easy by the time we’re done defining it! The word “tech” has a lot of different meanings. In the most casual sense, it’s a term applied to relatively creative or obscure card choices that go beyond the mainstream. A new card that no one is trying, an older one that no one has really played before, or just a personal favorite is often given the “tech” moniker, and it’s frequently used as a catch-all word to denote anything creative and successful. But in a more refined sense, it’s an offshoot concept of the issue we discussed last week: that of matchups and matchup analysis. Experienced TCG players generally take it to mean a single card (or multiple copies of a single card) placed in a deck in order to improve a player’s chances against a specific deck. The definition that I want to explore today is just that: tech as a silver bullet against specific strategies.
Stratics Network Announcement - 8:59 AM PST | Posted By: the traveler
Please join us on Wednesday, February 21, 2007, for a House of Commons with the developers of EverQuest at 5:00 PM Pacific / 8:00 PM Eastern in the #StraticsHoC channel onStratics IRC.
You can connect to one of our IRC servers through the use of your favorite IRC client or you can visit our new Downloads section to choose a suitable client. Connect to irc.stratics.com port 6668 or whichever server is closest to you:
stratics.frws.com port 6668, USA - Colorado
irc.glowfish.de port 6668, EU - Germany
stratics.afraidyet.net 6668, USA - Atlanta
You may also connect through our handy Java link which may be found right here. You must have Java installed to use this which can be downloaded from the Java homepage.
We will be discussing general topics with the developers, and general chat will be in our IRC channel #everquest before, during, and after the House of Commons.!
The following questions, presented by The Traveler of Stratics, were answered by Dan Bojansowski, the product manager of World of Warcraft Trading Card Game.
When Through The Dark Portal is released will we see the Heroes of Azeroth sets removed from store shelves? DB – Heroes of Azeroth is a base set for the WOW TCG and has many staple cards with recognizable in-game spells and characters. We want this product to be available to new players that begin playing the WOW TCG anytime within the first year. Also, for certain types of tournaments, Heroes of Azeroth booster packs will be used in addition to Through the Dark Portal booster packs. As such, we have printed what we feel is an appropriate amount of product to remain on retail shelves well beyond the release of Through the Dark Portal.
At the sneak preview events for The Dark Portal on March 31st and April 1st will players be able to acquire starters and boosters? DB – Yes, in limited quantities. Anyone that enters these Sneak Preview tournaments will be given some booster packs which they will use to construct their deck. There will be extra booster packs awarded to top finishers for these tournaments. Additionally, special prizes will be available which may include promo cards, deck tins, play mats and t-shirts (prizes still being finalized). If you can’t make it to a Sneak Preview tournament, be sure to look for Release Celebration tournaments on April 14-15 for more chances to win exclusive prizes.
Will there be a sneak preview event for Molten Core raid deck as well? DB – No, Sneak Previews in general are only done for booster/starter launches.
For the Onyxia Raid deck, will you make ever make the hero cards smaller or just large ones? This also applies to the upcoming Molton Core Raid deck which will be released in 2007. DB – Yes, we do plan on printing all three copies of the Onyxia hero card in normal card size. They will likely be available through the UDE Points Store. The same will probably be true for Molten Core Raid Deck.
When Heroes of Azeroth hit store shelves it sold out pretty quick. Will there be more sets of Through The Dark Portal made available at release time than there were for Heroes of Azeroth? DB – In short, yes. When we printed Heroes of Azeroth the first time, it was based on pre-orders and estimated demand. As you noted, it sold out very quickly. We were super excited about this, and immediately went back on press and got more Heroes of Azeroth on store shelves by early December. For Through the Dark Portal, we will print what we feel is an appropriate amount, based on pre-orders and our knowledge of the market. Now that retailers and distributors have seen the customer’s response to WOW TCG, the supply should become more in line with the demand.
Are there plans to release pre-constructed decks for game play? DB – Every starter decks come with a 33-card preconstructed deck. While this is not a big enough deck to take to a sanctioned tournament, it provides players with a basis for building a solid deck. In the Heroes of Azeroth starters, there were nine different pre-constructed decks (one for each of the classes). There will be nine NEW pre-constructed decks in the Through the Dark Portal starters.
Are there plans to release clothing featuring artwork from the cards? DB – We will not be doing a full line of clothing, but we will create t-shirts with card art that will be used as prizes through our Organized Play programs.
Do you know of any new items that will be added for in-game rewards? DB – Yes, lots. :)
Any chance we will see codes made available as loot in World of Warcraft that can be exchanged for card products? DB – Hmm… interesting. There are no plans for anything like this right now.
What's your favorite card and why? DB – Rise to the Challenge – While this is not the most competitive of cards, it is definitely very flavorful and fun. In the MMO, there is such satisfaction when you level up. I feel that this card does a fantastic job of bringing that feeling to the TCG. It takes a LONG time to pull it off, but when you do, the rewards are great!
Drafting, it's not just for NASCAR anymore. Bryan Lyons has posted a great way to play WoW:TCG at TCGPlayer.com. Give it a read and then try it with your friends. There is a lot of great info on how to use a draft system with WoW:TCG and how to have a lot of fun with it. Just try to sit more than two inches away from other players.
Drafting is a great and fun way to play the World of Warcraft TCG. For anyone who has never drafted, I will quickly explain how it is done. Each player (usually between 6 and 8) opens one booster pack, picks a card out of it and passes the remaining cards to the player on his left. Each player will then pick one card out of the 14 they were passed and so on until all the cards from the first pack are taken. This process is then repeated for three more packs except that packs 2 and 4 will be passed to the right. After all the packs have been opened and all the cards drafted, each player will build a minimum 30-card deck from his or her pool of cards. Knowing what to look for in a draft will go a long way in helping you get a good pool of cards to build your deck from.
It's once again time to go to the Head of the Class. Jeremy Blair has a new article up in the HotC series at the UDE WoW:TCG website. There's a great deck build and strategy tips in the article. Enjoy!
There were eight minutes left in the round. Many players had finished their best 2 out of 3 matches and were trading fantasy cardboard while awaiting the next round. A husband and wife debated who might be the first online player in the family to reach level 70, and someone overshadowed the rumble of the game-store hustle and bustle with a war cry of “Leeeeeroy Jeeenkins!” As the final minutes of the round approached, players and onlookers gathered around the remaining match.
Introducing the newest addition to the Stratics web page. The US ServerStatus page! Now you can see if your server is up and what the population islike.
WoW Warcry has posted an interview with Lead Designer, Tom Chilton. The interview takes a look back at the launch of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade and the new additions and changes to the game that have come about with its release.
To read the interview, be sure to visit their site here.
The World of Warcraft Arena Tournament is now live -- gather your allies, defeat your enemies, and prove that the prowess and skill of your team are unparalleled. The tournament will allow players to battle through the ranks for a chance to compete at live events, win prizes, and obtain the honor of being the best World of Warcraft PvP team in the world. For more information or questions regarding the tournament, please review the Tournament FAQ. Let the games begin!
With only Heroes of Azeroth in the environment, selecting the race of your hero in the WoW TCG was similarly arbitrary. Like the way night elves look? Think orcs say funny things when you click on them over and over? (“Stop poking me!”) Just want to play a human because, well, that’s what you are in real life (I hope)? All of these are perfectly reasonable justifications for playing one hero over another, and none of them really made a difference when you sat down to play.
The World of Warcraft® premium rubber play mats make the perfect accompaniment to the ''Through the Dark Portal'' expansion release. The 14” x 24” play mat is large enough to fit all of your World of Warcraft play space needs and its amazing original artwork will introduce players to the new Draenei and Blood Elf races. The play mat below will be available at the UDE store on April 11th, 2007 with an estimated price of $19.99 each.
Stuart Wright of StarcityWoW.com has a written a great article on building a warrior deck.
Today I'm going to talk about the warrior class. I have to admit my first thoughts about this class were pretty negative. However, as it turns out, this class does have a number of very powerful abilities and I was pleasantly surprised how powerful this deck was. You are required to have weapons and shields to make full use of the best abilities, but being forced to run Krol Blade doesn't seem to be a negative. I wanted to focus on Gorebelly, as his arms spec allows for the use of Mortal Strike. You could build a deck with very few allies here, similar to the Hunter deck I had a few articles back, but I wanted to try something different. Also, there are lots of cards that cause problems for decks with that design.
Stuart Wright of StarcityWoW.com has a written a great article on building a warrior deck.
Today I'm going to talk about the warrior class. I have to admit my first thoughts about this class were pretty negative. However, as it turns out, this class does have a number of very powerful abilities and I was pleasantly surprised how powerful this deck was. You are required to have weapons and shields to make full use of the best abilities, but being forced to run Krol Blade doesn't seem to be a negative. I wanted to focus on Gorebelly, as his arms spec allows for the use of Mortal Strike. You could build a deck with very few allies here, similar to the Hunter deck I had a few articles back, but I wanted to try something different. Also, there are lots of cards that cause problems for decks with that design.
The Darkmoon Faire is coming to town! The official WoW:TCG website has announced the first dates and cities for the Darkmoon Faire events. Be sure to let us know if you attend one of the events and how you did.
The World of Warcraft TCG Darkmoon Faire is on its way to a city near you. All year long, the Faire will be visiting an exciting new city around the world, bringing tons of fun things to do and tons of awesome prizes to win. If you think you’re one of the best and want to show off your TCG chops, or if you just want to come hang out with your guildmates, then this is the place for you!
Every Darkmoon Faire will offer plenty of demos of the Trading Card Game. There will also be beginner tournaments using the WoW TCG starter decks, so you can play even if you haven’t bought a pack yet.
More competitive players can sign up for the Darkmoon Faire Dream Machine Championship on Saturday morning. The winner will get to design a custom gaming desktop or laptop computer, while top finishers will win cool prizes including iPods and Xbox 360s. Every player who enters will get a new Extended Art promo card.
Need to take a break? Grab a drink and hit our lounge with friends, or arrange a meeting with your friends and guildies from the online game. You can walk around and check out the booths showing off cool World of Warcraft gear, or try your luck at one of the Darkmoon Faire carnival games.
In an earlier news post we saw ways to build Druid decks. The Quest Log – Jekyll and Hyde article by Tim “Just Landed” Willoughby at the official WoW:TCG website takes the idea of using Druid decks further.
Within the World of Warcraft TCG, there are a few classes that can feasibly fall into one of a number of different roles, but there are none quite as versatile as the Druid. Between powerful healing abilities and more aggressive moves like Starfire, the Druid can pretty much do whatever you want it to do. A Druid might not be as immediately good at any individual style of play as its various competitors, but its versatility definitely counts. Just looking at Natural Selection makes it clear that being able to do a little bit of everything is part and parcel of the Druid strategy.
The Lazy Peon is back at the official WoW:TCG website with another great deck build and strategy.
In my “Regionals Extravaganza” article, I mentioned that Graccus took first place in the Chicago Lazy Peon Challenge. Looking back, the deck had 64 cards and was bulky. This week, we’ll see what we can do to slim it down; Graccus made a New Year’s resolution to shed some weight, and we want to hold someone who’s a paragon of good to his word.
Jason Grabher-Meyer has put up a great article at the official WoW:TCG website about learning to spot which deck your opponent is using.
Having a great deck and a great strategy won't win the war. You need to be able to figure out what your opponent is doing before you find yourself sitting on the sidelines instead of winning the tournament.
Sometimes the deck you’re playing gives either you or your opponent an advantage, and it might have little to do with you as a player. It could be something as subtle as one competitor running a couple cards that happen to hurt the other’s central strategy, or it could be something massive like designing your deck specifically to counter the opponent’s. But for better or worse, you’re going to have an easier time competing if you know what you tend to win against, and what tends to win against you.
It's time to move to the Head Of The Class! This exciting new series at the official WoW:TCG website will focus on building decks around the various races and classes in WoW:TCG. The first article, linked above, focuses on the Druid Deck.
In the first articles, we will focus on the Horde and Alliance versions of the Druid class, followed by Priests and Rogues. After Regionals, there was a windfall of decklists popping up across the Internet. To date, many players/authors have focused on some of the most popular classes, including Warlock, Hunter, and Mage. In time, this article will tackle refined builds of these classes, but it seemed like a good idea to spread the media-love to some of the more neglected classes.
The articles will explore the nature of a given class in the online game, how the card game captures a class’s online themes, and possible deck builds based on those flavors and themes.
Blizzard Entertainment and Pocket Books plan to release a Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness novelization. Aaron Rosenberg, author of Starcraft: Queen of Blades, is writing World of Warcraft: Tides of Darkness, which is due August. Aaron Rosenberg will discuss details of his novel with fans at a public Q&A on IRC chat this Sunday, February 18 at 9pm EST.
irc.gamesurge.net #blizzplanet
Blizzard announced months ago the plan to release an expansion yearly. The recent pocket books seem to tie-in with the MMORPG. Will the new novel light up speculations on the next World of Warcraft expansion pack? http://www.blizzplanet.com/news/1228/
Developer Comments - 5:55 AM PST | Posted By: Dramora
In this recent thread, Nethaera explained why flying mounts won't work in Azeroth.
As much as people keep trying to convince us we need to do this there are reasons for things being the way they are. For one, Outland was created specifically with flying mounts in mind. From the ground up to the sky, we worked on the technology involved to make this happen. For another, by keeping them a part of Outland, it makes them unique to the new land and relays a sense of 'ooh and ahh' that they aren't commonplace all around Azeroth too. Also, to retro-fit Azeroth to allow for them would take a lot of time and it's time we'd much rather dedicate to moving forward towards new content than trying to rework something.
Time and resources are two things we are very careful about and as you can see from reading the forums, a lot of people believe we should be doing more with it no matter how much we actually do. We do the best we can to put out fixes and content as quickly as possible but we have a constraint we've put on ourselves as well that if we are going to put something out there, that we should do it well and with Blizzard quality in mind. This is something that will always be at the top of our list to strive for.
Ommra answered a few questions regarding the New Arena System going into effect on Friday, February 16 in this thread.
Players: Can you add a team member after the season started and will he get ranked according to the teams accomplishments? Blizzard: Yes. The rating is tied to the team, not each individual member. As such, if a person leaves a team, he/she will lose his/her rating, but will not lose any arena points that have already been accumulated.
Players: Is there an Arena Team Master (like Guild Master) who can kick other members at will? Blizzard: Yes. The player that creates the team is the team leader.
Players: If you are within the top 0,5% in several brackets (e.g. 2v2 and 5v5), do you receive 2 different titles and 2 mounts? Blizzard: It is the same title regardless of the bracket, so the player would only have 1 new title. However, they should get 2 mounts in the mail.
Players: Do you have to learn the riding skill for the armoured Netherdrake or will you receive it with the mount? Blizzard: The mount requires 300 riding skill in order to use.
Players: Are there different rewards for the second season? Blizzard: This hasn’t been decided yet, we will let you know in due time if there are any changes for the second season.
It doesn't really matter which game you are in, in most cases travelling can be a royal pain in the behind. It is either dangerous, time consuming, or in most cases both. Very few games these days have an "easy" mode of travel. By easy I mean instantaneous without the help of others.
For example, the only world left, that I know of, that you can instantly travel from one location to another is Ultima Online, where you can recall. But even in this game there are lands and dungeons where you have to walk/ride to get where you are going.
In World of Warcraft it is the same. And to me, travelling wouldn't be so bad, if you didn't have quests that send you back and forth back and forth back and forth to locations across the map. Sometimes even the same location you had just gone to.
Travelling costs money, unless you do it on foot. But in many cases, it takes longer. Travellling is nice once you hit 40 and get your first mount. Nicer when you hit 60 and get your epic mount. It's also nice when you're a druid and you get travel form or hunter with aspects of cheetah or pack.
Otherwise it's a pain.
If you're a mage, sure you can portal somewhere, if you know the spell to portal to that city. But once again, it's a select city. Can't go to the minor city. You have to rely on a mount.
Ever travel in Star Wars Galaxies? I did. Before there were speeeders...before there were quick transports from one place to another. At least WoW isn't that bad but still.....UGH. Travelling is a drag. Hop on a griffon, go cook something or go get a beer, use the bathroom, or for me make a quick run across the street (yes literally) to the store.
While I don't think travel should be instantaneous, it should be a little shorter than it is.
What do you feel about travel in WoW? IS it a pain at lower levels like I think it is, or is it just something you deal with because you know, eventually, you'll get a mount?
We’re pleased to offer a preview of the first global World of Warcraft Arena Tournament, which is scheduled to begin on Friday, February 16. In this one-of-a-kind competition, Burning Crusade players will have the chance to demonstrate their prowess and vie for the title of best World of Warcraft PvP team on the planet. Click this link to check out the preview, and be sure to visit the Arena System page for a general overview of Arena combat.
Eyonix made the following announcement on an hotfix which Blizzard has implemented.
We've applied a hotfix to the Mechanar wing of Tempest Keep. The door at the top of the elevator was remaining closed after a group would wipe to Pathaleon, preventing players from completing the instance. The door now properly opens after a group wipe, letting players travel to Pathaleon and kill him.
Additionally, we've applied a hotfix that removed the Bloodwarder Protectors in the Botanica wing of Tempest Keep, prior to the Laj encounter.
General News - 12:57 PM PST | Posted By: Lady Beth
Here are the Patch Notes from Patch 2.0.7 which was implemented today.
General
The amount of haste granted by a point of haste rating has been increased by about 50%.
20 slot bags are now bind on equip.
Any effect which benefits the victim of a critical strike will now trigger even if resilience converted the attack from a critical strike to a normal strike; this applies to melee, ranged, and spell. The affected talents, abilities, and items are: "Eye for an Eye", "Blessed Resilience", "Enrage", "Martyrdom", "Blood Craze", "Eye of the Storm", and "Bonespike Shoulder".
The Crust Bruster has had a loot icon and sound change.
Players can no longer send gift wrapped packages via COD.
PvP Battlegrounds
If Primalist Thurloga is attacked and pulled off her pathing on the way to summon Lokholar the Ice Lord, she will now properly path back to the summoning ring to complete the event.
PVP flags and graveyard nodes can no longer be captured through collision.
Raids and Dungeons
Players are no longer able to accept the quest "The Opening of the Dark Portal" while the Black Morass encounter is engaged.
In the Black Morass, Chrono Lord Deja will now properly spawn during a Heroic Mode attempt.
After completing the Black Morass encounter, all the additional mobs in the zone will no longer all aggro.
Durnholde Lookouts will now properly despawn after all 5 of the Baracks in Caverns of Time: Escape from Durnholde are burned down.
The items required to complete the Karazhan key quest can now only be looted by the first group in the instance to reach them.
Berthold the Doorman will now have a gossip option to teleport players to the Shade of Aran's room. This gossip option only becomes available when players have defeated the Shade of Aran.
The aggro range for players when under the effect of "Incite Chaos" while fighting Blackheart the Inciter in the Shadow Labrynth has been adjusted.
Many creatures within Coilfang Resevoir have been slightly retuned.
Many creatures within the Mana Tombs have been slightly retuned.
Mac
Stability improvements in Multi-Threaded OpenGL support on future OS X releases.
Bug Fixes
The talent "Combat Potency" no longer causes rogues to have a chance to gain energy when other players hit them with off-hand attacks.
Players with multiple chat windows will no longer have fixed channels (ie. general, trade) added back to the main chat window every time they log on.
Attempting to prospect less than 5 pieces of ore will no longer cause a game crash. (Spanish Only)
The Fel Reaver for "It's A Fel Reaver, But With Heart" quest will now respawn properly if you wipe on the quest.
Fixed the local defense channel so that it will properly change based on the player's zone.
You can see all of the current and previous Patch Notes in our PATCH NOTES forum.
Something is in the air in the major cities of Azeroth. Some call it love, and some just call it friendship and admiration. Whichever it is, many guards and townsfolks now spend their days giving and receiving tokens and gifts to other amorous citizens. The more skeptical, however, are suspicious of the strange "love sickness" clouding the hearts of so many...
Don't miss the exciting gift exchange and worldwide popularity contest soon to hit Azeroth when love is in the air!
Community News - 10:46 AM PST | Posted By: Lady Beth
Gameshark gives an honest review of TBC, here is a snippet of the article:
When guilds have enough members reach level 70, and are fairly well geared from the 5 and 10 man instances, they can expect to be setting foot in some larger 25 man raid instances. Being able to complete dungeons of this side will net players with some of the best rewards. Not to leave players whom aren't in large guilds out, Blizzard has implemented a dungeon difficulty setting. High level players can set the difficulty of a dungeon to a higher level, for a better challenge and better rewards (much like Dungeons and Dragons Online.)
The game isn't all about being 60 plus though. Each faction, Horde and Alliance, will receive a new race. In addition, players can now play classes previously not allowed for their faction. Blood Elves will join the Horde and now be allowed to play the Paladin class. Dranei, new friends of the Alliance, are now allowed to become Shaman. Each race has its own new starting area. Just like the Outlands, Blizzard’s art department clearly put a lot of work into these areas. Near the Night Elf starting area, The Exodar, an intergalactic spaceship has crash landed on a group of islands. Luckily the island they picked to land on only has beasts ranging from level 1-20. North of the Plaguelands in Eastern Kingdoms you will find the Blood Elf starting area. Deep with Warcraft lore, the area almost feels to be in a perpetual autumn day in New England, with beautiful colors everywhere you look.
General Europe News - 5:12 AM PST | Posted By: Dramora
Thundgot posted the opening of the new Battlegroup forums on this thread. Check it out!
We’re happy to announce the opening of forums for all Battlegroups. Step inside to share your victories and engage in discussions with other players in your Battlegroup. For an overview of the realms in each Battlegroup visit the Battlegroups page.
General The amount of haste granted by a point of haste rating has been increased by about 50%. 20 slot bags are now bind on equip. Any effect which benefits the victim of a critical strike will now trigger even if resilience converted the attack from a critical strike to a normal strike; this applies to melee, ranged, and spell. The affected talents, abilities, and items are: "Eye for an Eye", "Blessed Resilience", "Enrage", "Martyrdom", "Blood Craze", "Eye of the Storm", and "Bonespike Shoulder". The Crust Bruster has had a loot icon and sound change. Players can no longer send gift wrapped packages via COD. When sharing a quest, the order logic has changed to check whether or not the player has completed or is ineligible for the quest before checking whether their quest log is full.
PvP Battlegrounds If Primalist Thurloga is attacked and pulled off her pathing on the way to summon Lokholar the Ice Lord, she will now properly path back to the summoning ring to complete the event. PVP flags and graveyard nodes can no longer be captured through collision.
Raids and Dungeons
Players are no longer able to accept the quest "The Opening of the Dark Portal" while the Black Morass encounter is engaged. In the Black Morass, Chrono Lord Deja will now properly spawn during a Heroic Mode attempt. After completing the Black Morass encounter, all the additional mobs in the zone will no longer all aggro. Durnholde Lookouts will now properly despawn after all 5 of the Baracks in Caverns of Time: Escape from Durnholde are burned down. The items required to complete the Karazhan key quest can now only be looted by the first group in the instance to reach them. A teleporter has been added to Barnes (in the front entrance of Karazhan) that activates after the Shade of Aran is killed. This will port players back up to the Shade of Aran’s room to allow more attempts on Prince Malchazzar. The aggro range for players when under the effect of "Incite Chaos" while fighting Blackheart the Inciter in the Shadow Labrynth has been adjusted. Many creatures within Coilfang Resevoir have been slightly retuned. Many creatures within the Mana Tombs have been slightly retuned.
Mac Stability improvements in Multi-Threaded OpenGL support on future OS X releases.
Bug Fixes The talent "Combat Potency" no longer causes rogues to have a chance to gain energy when other players hit them with off-hand attacks. Players with multiple chat windows will no longer have fixed channels (ie. general, trade) added back to the main chat window every time they log on. Attempting to prospect less than 5 pieces of ore will no longer cause a game crash. (Spanish Only) The Fel Reaver for "It's A Fel Reaver, But With Heart" quest will now respawn properly if you wipe on the quest. Fixed a crash that could occur when on a flight path. Fixed the local defense channel so that it will properly change based on the player's zone.
General Europe News - 1:04 AM PST | Posted By: Dramora
Thundgot posted the latest free migrations on the WoW European board.
Note: any free migration may be changed or closed at any time.
Please keep this thread on the topic of the below migrations. Posts concerning other migrations (requests, old migrations, PCT, etc) will not be responded to here.
The below migrations will be activated today (Wednesday February 7th). They're scheduled to close at the start of the maintenance on Wednesday February 14th. However, again, please note that this may change at any time.
Grim Batol to Spinebreaker Outland to Spinebreaker Warsong to Spinebreaker
General Europe News - 12:42 AM PST | Posted By: Lady Beth
Happy Birthday WoW EU! To mark this momentous occasion, Shane Dabiri, (Lead Producer) had this to say:
Greetings Travelers of Azeroth and beyond,
On the eve of the second anniversary of World of Warcraft in Europe, we wanted to reiterate our gratitude to our European audience for helping us achieve a record-breaking launch with The Burning Crusade. Since the launch, we’ve already begun looking ahead to the great new content in store for players.
On February 16th, the first season of the Arena tournament will begin. Blizzard has a longstanding tradition of providing compelling multiplayer competitive gaming, dating all the way back to Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, and we are continuing that tradition with the World of Warcraft Arena System (http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/arena/index.html). Stay tuned to the community website for more details on the upcoming tournament.
Farther ahead are the Black Temple and its master, Illidan. In Warcraft III we watched Illidan’s transformation from controversial hero to demon. His ambition and sorcery nearly tore Azeroth apart in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. Despite his efforts, he failed to destroy the Lich King and thus earned the wrath of Kil'jaeden, leader of the Burning Legion. Badly wounded, Illidan retreated to Outland and worked to solidify his base of power there. Now, in The Burning Crusade, Illidan fights to retain his grip on Outland. We hope players will look forward to venturing into the Black Temple and facing this immensely powerful fallen hero.
Looking specifically toward the European community, we are still seeing amazing -- and ever-increasing -- activity. This enormous growth, however, has not stopped us from managing to keep queues to a minimum across all regions and realms; we will continue to employ free and paid character transfers, in addition to opening new realms as the need arises.
Speaking of the community, our fan site program now includes over 40 fan sites in more than 15 languages. Furthermore, we now have a total of 6 European most valuable posters (MVPs) who, in addition to our many players, continue to enrich and enlighten the forums with information, advice, and banter. And we recently opened the Community Events forums, making it even easier to keep track of the huge amount of weekly events organized by players and fan sites.
Once again, we thank you for your continued support of World of Warcraft over the past two years. Every day, we’re humbled by players’ enthusiasm for the game, and it fuels us to create new and exciting content. We’re looking forward to celebrating the next year with you as we all continue our adventures together in Azeroth, and now Outland as well.
Stratics Network Announcement - 12:36 AM PST | Posted By: Lady Beth
Please join us on Monday, February 12, 2007, for a House of Commons with the developers of Lord of the Rings Online at 5:00 PM Pacific / 8:00 PM Eastern in the #StraticsHoC channel on Stratics IRC.
You can connect to one of our IRC servers through the use of your favorite IRC client or you can visit our new Downloads section to choose a suitable client. Connect to irc.stratics.com port 6668 or whichever server is closest to you:
stratics.frws.com port 6668, USA - Colorado
irc.glowfish.de port 6668, EU - Germany
stratics.afraidyet.net 6668, USA - Atlanta
You may also connect through our handy Java link which may be found right here. You must have Java installed to use this which can be downloaded from the Java homepage.
We will be discussing general topics with the developers, and general chat will be in our IRC channel #middle-earth before, during, and after the House of Commons.
Developer Comments - 11:17 AM PST | Posted By: Dramora
Drysc recently explained the reason behind premades on the PTR in this thread on the WoW message boards.
The PTRs and the availability of premade characters depends heavily on a necessity for them to be used for testing. For a while we were using premades for most PTRs as the character copy functionality was facing technical issues, and while the premades weren't actually necessary for testing they did help us overcome issues related to the character copy system. Since resolving those issues we don't plan to offer premades unless their presence is felt to have a profound impact on the changes being tested. We want players to play characters they're familiar with, to get the most out of their experience and test reports.
If we do offer premades it's because their availability is seen as a positive means to get more players testing specific high level content, but that's not always going to be the case. The PTRs are literally Test Realms, and their purpose does not include trying out new classes, *talent builds, and consequence-free PvP. We intend to keep their purpose focused on testing the content being applied with the patch, and premades will commonly not provide a benefit for that goal.
*Talent builds may need testing with some patches but we of course prefer that players with characters of those classes are the ones testing them, in which case premades would still likely not be offered.
Developer Comments - 1:35 AM PST | Posted By: Dramora
Dabiri posted on the EU forum:
Greetings Travelers of Azeroth and beyond,
On the eve of the second anniversary of World of Warcraft in Europe, we wanted to reiterate our gratitude to our European audience for helping us achieve a record-breaking launch with The Burning Crusade. Since the launch, we’ve already begun looking ahead to the great new content in store for players.
On February 16th, the first season of the Arena tournament will begin. Blizzard has a longstanding tradition of providing compelling multiplayer competitive gaming, dating all the way back to Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, and we are continuing that tradition with the World of Warcraft Arena System . Stay tuned to the community website for more details on the upcoming tournament.
Farther ahead are the Black Temple and its master, Illidan. In Warcraft III we watched Illidan’s transformation from controversial hero to demon. His ambition and sorcery nearly tore Azeroth apart in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. Despite his efforts, he failed to destroy the Lich King and thus earned the wrath of Kil'jaeden, leader of the Burning Legion. Badly wounded, Illidan retreated to Outland and worked to solidify his base of power there. Now, in The Burning Crusade, Illidan fights to retain his grip on Outland. We hope players will look forward to venturing into the Black Temple and facing this immensely powerful fallen hero.
Looking specifically toward the European community, we are still seeing amazing -- and ever-increasing -- activity. This enormous growth, however, has not stopped us from managing to keep queues to a minimum across all regions and realms; we will continue to employ free and paid character transfers, in addition to opening new realms as the need arises.
Speaking of the community, our fan site program now includes over 40 fan sites in more than 15 languages. Furthermore, we now have a total of 6 European most valuable posters (MVPs) who, in addition to our many players, continue to enrich and enlighten the forums with information, advice, and banter. And we recently opened the Community Events forums, making it even easier to keep track of the huge amount of weekly events organized by players and fan sites.
Once again, we thank you for your continued support of World of Warcraft over the past two years. Every day, we’re humbled by players’ enthusiasm for the game, and it fuels us to create new and exciting content. We’re looking forward to celebrating the next year with you as we all continue our adventures together in Azeroth, and now Outland as well.
The 2.0.7 Public Test Realms are now live and we invite all players to help test the upcoming changes by copying characters and downloading the PTR client. You can find the most current 2.0.7 patch notes here.
You can begin copying your characters and downloading the 2.0.7 client through Account Management here.
As always please use the Test Realm Forum for any reports of bugs or issues with the patch being tested, as well as any conversation concerning the PTRs.
A nice little piece of news from our friends at Infoceptor.
The Australian Gaming association has just announced the nominees for there 2007 Australian Game Awards. Naturally... World of Warcraft is on the list... well in fact, two lists:
While the gamers in line in California were celebrating the launch with a World of Warcraft-inspired dance-off (as seen in our previous video featurette), The Burning Crusade was already sweeping through Europe. Blizzard developers were on hand at major release events in London, Paris, Berlin, and Stockholm to usher in the expansion together with thousands of European players. View the footage from these events in part two of our Burning Crusade launch video.
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade was recently featured in an interview with lead designer Tom Chilton. This interview will air February 10 and 11, during the Computer Gaming Invitational on Direct TV. Visit the Championship Gaming Series a site for more information.
Note: any free migration may be changed or closed at any time.
Please keep this thread on the topic of the below migrations. Posts concerning other migrations (requests, old migrations, PCT, etc) will not be responded to here.
The below migrations will be activated today (Wednesday February 7th). They're scheduled to close at the start of the maintenance on Wednesday February 14th. However, again, please note that this may change at any time.
Grim Batol to Spinebreaker Outland to Spinebreaker Warsong to Spinebreaker
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This is the first editorial in a series to be written weekly for WoW Stratics. Your feedback is more than welcomed in the forums on the article and is encouraged. Tell me what you think.
I have been playing MMOs for almost 8 years now, World of Warcraft for the past two come April. Yet, amazingly, my highest level, Desyree, is only 36 and was created before Christmas along side a long time friend. Before hand, I created characters, played only on weekends for a few hours at a time, but just couldn't find my niche with a character other than my druid on another server. But even then, the grind was just something that drove me insane.
Prior to the warlock, I tried out a night elf priest and just didn't get into it. Couldn't. Perhaps it was because my guildmates from UO had all made newb characters and grouped up and it took me 4-5 hours to gain 5 levels and I got frustrated. Perhaps it was because they just expected me to know everything. Hard to say. That drove me away from the game for months though. I came back, deleted the priest and was told "Make a hunter".
So I created Kayhynn and I'm still playing her, albeit slowly. She's level 31 now and while I keep hearing how hunters are overpowered, I just don't see it. I could take my warlock to places that I can't take my hunter because she just gets spanked by mobs. Though I have to admit, I loved PVPing with her at Warsong Gulch.
At the same time, I created a druid on Bronzebeard, who is now 26. As I don't play there much, I created a druid, Maionna, on Whisperwind and have been leveling her up.
All the time while I've been playing these three characters, several things came to mind. One of which was brought up the other night by the guildmate who just started in December. The question arose after we had to repeatedly explain to a level 28 night elf hunter why taking him through Stromgarde wasn't wise just yet and if we did, he needed to stay BACK because of his aggro radius. He didn't understand why he kept dying and being swarmed despite explanations and finally said "I better go do something more my level."
"Was I -ever- that n00bish?" the relatively new guildmate asks.
I had to pause and laugh at that question before giving him an honest answer of "Yes" followed by "You still are."
Then realized, for that matter after two years of casual playing, I still am.
I honestly don't know what people did before they could look up quests. I normally try to complete quests on my own without looking up the answers. But for example, the warlock felhunter quest, you can't. I tried and tried and tried to find the tattered manuscript. It was nowhere to be found. The quest description said "A centaur horded it" so naturally from all the other quests where you have to kill things to get your parts, I figured "Well, lets kill the centaurs."
We killed Centaurs for an hour before I was told "Go look in the cave"
Okay. Cave. GREAT. More bloody centaurs. Kill kill kill, still nothing. Finally I give in and look it up. Its in a chest at the back of the cave sorta hidden.
Had I not looked it up, finding it would have taken me quite some time and frustration. And I find this is true for many quests in Warcraft.
"Bring back 8 panther paws"
Great. Easy quest. NOT!
First of all, don't all panthers have 4 paws? Why do they give just one and not 4? Or they give none at all. I think I killed 20-30 panthers just to complete the quest, leveling at least once in it.
The best quests are the FedEX quests (here on refered to as FedUP quests). They look like this.
"I need you to deliver this message to so and so."
So and so is right outside the door, not even 5 yards away. And inside you just want to say "Do it yourself." But knowing it's a quest chain you don't. So you deliver it. They give you a message to deliver back. Then they give you a message to go all the way across the continent somewhere else. You bring it back to them and they say "OH YEAH I need blahblahblah from here" in the same location way across the continent.
Now, I'm not going to say I dislike the quest system, I don't. But as a budding player who despises walking every place or flying every place all the time, it grows a little frustrating. I do it, but doesn't mean I'm happy about it. Especially when the XP it generates isn't worth it. There are some where the quest chains end with a well worthwhile reward (Ring of Krynn anyone?) but there are others that just aren't worth it, and you don't know it unless you look it up or reach the end.
And that comes to a topic for another discussion....traveling.
But until then, what have your experiences with questing been like? What things would you like to see changed, or to be made more fun? Are some quests too easy and others that look like they should be easy ridiculously hard? What frustrates you most about quests and on the other hand, makes you happy about them? And what did you do before you could look up quests?
The following answer was posted by Drysc on how stacking works with the new items on the Official Forums
There's not any current intention to allow either on-foot or mounted travel to be increased beyond 10% that each type of travel already allows. So regardless of what you have equipped you're not going to get above 10%. The riding crop is really just a one stop replacement so you can clear out some space you might have been using for other speed increases. Hey, there's the bag space solution you've been wanting! Enjoy. ;)
We have upcoming development plans which we wanted to share now, as it could impact choices that Druids might make in the immediate future regarding flying mount riding skills or purchasing epic mounts:
The regular Storm Crow form remains trainable at level 68 and moves at 60%. Also as previous, the normal flying mount skill comes with the form.
An epic quest line will be going into an upcoming patch which will grant Druids an additional flying form with increased stats. The epic flying form will move at the epic rate of 280%, but basically fall under the same conditions as the previous flight form (i.e. can't run on the ground).
However, the first prerequisite of the quest will require the epic flying mount riding skill, so it would not be a loss to Druids if they wish to purchase their epic flying mount skill now or in the near future. Obviously, one could then diversify their epic mounts beyond the Druid's casted epic form if they choose.
Sounds like a good thing for druids. I look forward to that when I get to that level.
In an interesting article posted over at Eurogamer, Itzik Ben Bassat, Blizzard's Vice President of Business Development that there will be no World of Warcraft for consoles. Here's a small excerpt from the article:
World of Warcraft is a cow with golden milk, but despite its obvious grazing success, it definitely won't be seeing the light of day on Xbox 360 or PS3.
Blizzard's vice president of business development, Itzik Ben Bassat, told our sister site GamesIndustry.biz that consoles still lacked the accomplishments of PC, specifically in the online department, which would have to develop further before it would appeal to the developer.
"We are not going to develop WoW for consoles. WoW was designed for PC and I think it will stay that way," he said. "Online console gaming is still in its very early stages, and it needs to be developed further to provide opportunities of a scale which will be interesting to us. "
We wanted to take this time to remind players that the use of power-leveling services, which generally involves a player paying a person or company to level up a character on the player's behalf, is a violation of our account-sharing policy. The common concern with power-leveling services, and with account-sharing in general, is that sharing access to the account involves players providing their login information (login name and password) to another person. From there, the person receiving this private information is able to do anything they wish with the characters on that account, such as transfer all the gold and items to other players, use the characters in conjunction with hack programs for illicit purposes in the game, and/or delete the characters.
In general, we urge players to refrain from sharing their login information with anyone for any reason, as it's the owner of the account who will be held accountable for all login uses, regardless of whether or not the owner granted authorization or approval. In the event that you become aware of or reasonably suspect any breach of security, including without limitation any loss, theft, or unauthorized disclosure of your login information, please immediately notify Blizzard by emailing wowaccountadmin@blizzard.com.
As always, it is strongly advised to never give your username and password out to ANYONE. Please be sure to heed their advice.
Heroes of Azeroth is a pretty big set of cards, which means that it’s going to take some time to organize your collection. A smaller set—like the Onyxia’s Lair cards—is going to be a lot easier no matter how many you own because the number of different cards is more manageable. The good news is that the numbering system in the World of Warcraft TCG lends itself to organization, and it’s a system that can be adapted to any needs you may have.
I have often found myself telling others that something that makes our community so alive is the passion for the game that so many exhibit. Even when asked how I deal with the negative posts that are upset about something, I explain that it's a player's passion that drives them to begin with and I'd rather see that passion than the apathy that can appear. It's that passion that keeps people interested and playing whether positive or negative.
So in turn, I ask you as a topic I'd love to see thrive; What makes you passionate about World of Warcraft?
What is it that keeps you playing? Is it the friends? The lore? The graphic style? Your character class? Or is it the whole package? Tell me what you are passionate about.
The article One Card at a Time: Kaal Soulreaper is available at the WoW TCG website. This is a strategy article on building a deck around the Kaal Soulreaper card and staying alive long enough in game to take advantage of it.
So, you’re probably wondering how an effect that takes a total of 14 resources to use is the big deal that I talked about finding before. Well, the key is in setting up your graveyard to take advantage of the effect, thus allowing you to put far more than 14 resources’ worth of allies into play. In order to use Kaal effectively, we need to figure out three key things:
1) How will we survive to the point when we can play Kaal Soulreaper and use his power? This includes figuring out a way to protect him if we plan to use his power before we have 14 resources, as well as which hero we want to use.
2) Which allies do we want to have in our graveyard to return to play?
3) How are we going to get our allies into the graveyard for the big turn, and how are we going to limit the advantage our opponent gains from the effect?
Stratics Network Announcement - 4:11 AM PST | Posted By: the traveler
Stratics Second Life is pleased to announce our fantastic exclusive competition to five lucky Stratics users, to win a free copy of "Second Life - A documentary", a 50 minute programme filmed entirely within the online environment Second Life, explaining what it is all about, and featuring interviews with a number of players.
Second Life is a fully immersive, player created, 3D environment with over 3 million registered users. It is a realisation of The Metaverse, as described in the novel "Snowcrash".
If you are not familiar with the documentary, please read our interview with the creators, Robo Studios, here
Enter our competition here. Please drop by the Stratics Second Life forums here, or download and create your free Second Life account.
Our Ask the WoW Developers Q&A has started back up again. You can submit your question here(one question per person please).
All questions need to be in by February 15th, we will take the top ten questions and forward them onto Blizzard. Make sure you check back on February 25th to see if your question was answered by Blizzard!
We are hoping to make this a monthly event so make sure you keep checking back!
On the WoW EU official boards, Ommra gave Warlocks a little hope in that a future patch might fix the problem of pets not vanishing when using a flying mount.
We intend to make a change so that Warlock pets will vanish when you mount and reappear when you dismount from flying mounts, regular mounts and even flight paths to help conserve the need to use soul shards to resummon.
This will most likely be in a future patch that we do however, we do not have a specific date as of yet. At current our testing is looking promising for this feature.
We will be performing a scheduled maintenance this week and will be bringing all realms down on Tuesday, February 6th at 5:00 AM PST. All realms will be brought back up at 11:00 AM PST.
From Australia's leading newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, comes an extremely informative article about the dangers of game addiction and the research into linking it with mental health.
Here are some excerpts...
"Doctors didn't believe Liz Woolley when she said her son was addicted to an internet game in which players take on the roles of elves, ogres and trolls.
Sure, her son, Shawn, 21, was depressed, they said, telling Woolley the 12-hour days of game-playing, the social isolation and the personality changes were a side effect rather than a cause of the American man's mental deterioration.
But today, five years after Shawn Woolley committed suicide at his keyboard, the medical profession is taking his mother's concerns more seriously."
And...
"Distressed family members blame fantasy games such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft, which differ from conventional video games because the player takes part in an ongoing drama with thousands of other players worldwide.
Manufacturers say the games aren't addictive but experts point out they provide an alternative life in which people who don't feel they are successful in real life can become powerful as characters - or plug into a world where they are welcome."
And...
"The games' manufacturers said via email that it was the responsibility of the individual player to monitor time spent playing the game. "We feel that a person's day-to-day life should take precedence over any form of entertainment," wrote Paul Sams, chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of World of Warcraft.
Sony Online Entertainment issued a similar statement regarding its game, EverQuest. Yet mental health professionals say the games are designed to encourage players to stay online, creating scenarios that entice them to keep playing to build their characters' power, as well as providing no definitive conclusion to the game."
To read this insightful article in full, head over here.
WAR Stratics has released their coverage of the EA Mythic Press Event, January '07!
My first view of the game this time around is amazing. Plumes of black smoke rise in the distance. Obviously something over there needs my attention! On my way to investigate there are farmers running around. Ducking, weaving, crying over lost farmsteads and general confusion abound. I've been in game all of 10 seconds. This is gonna be AWESOME! We'll get into more of the good stuff later. For now, the rest of the overview!
The review includes a look at the newly released races of Chaos, and the Human Empire.
The screenshots released at this event can be found in the WAR Stratics gallery.
General Europe News - 6:25 AM PST | Posted By: Lady Beth
Blizzard EU will be celebrating their two year anniversary on February 11th, so to celebrate, Blizzard will be holding a few contests in which you have a chance to win AlienWare computers! Head on over here to find out all the details and good luck!
Blizzard recently released a statement confirming that they have signed with The9 to bring TBC over to Mainland China. Here is the official word on it from Blizzard.com
IRVINE, Calif. – February 1, 2007 - Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that it has signed an agreement with The9 for the operation of World of Warcraft®: The Burning Crusade™ in mainland China. The9 currently operates Blizzard Entertainment®'s critically acclaimed massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft, in China, where the game is played by more than 3.5 million subscribers. Localization of The Burning Crusade, Blizzard's first World of Warcraft expansion, into simplified Chinese is underway, and further details regarding the release of the expansion in China will be announced in the months ahead.
The new agreement between Blizzard and The9 includes provisions for hardware upgrades to the existing World of Warcraft infrastructure to enable the best gaming experience possible for players in China. Working closely with Blizzard's global teams, The9 will continue providing local community management, technical support, and 24/7 in-game customer service. The9 also manages distribution of game cards and the physical hosting of World of Warcraft and The Burning Crusade on local servers.
"We're fully committed to ensuring that the ongoing operation of World of Warcraft in mainland China will provide an excellent experience for players there for many years to come," said Mike Morhaime, president and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We look forward to extending that commitment with this expansion as well as with future Blizzard releases."
Launched in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand in mid January, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade smashed the day-one sales record for PC games, selling nearly 2.4 million copies within its first 24 hours of availability.* World of Warcraft is played by more than 8 million subscribers worldwide.
World of Warcraft's Subscriber Definition
World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.
Best known for blockbuster hits including World of Warcraft® and the Warcraft®, StarCraft®, and Diablo® series, Blizzard Entertainment® (www.blizzard.com), a division of Vivendi Games, is a premier developer and publisher of entertainment software renowned for creating many of the industry's most critically acclaimed games. Blizzard's track record includes nine #1-selling games and multiple Game of the Year awards. The company's free Internet gaming service, Battle.net®, reigns as the largest in the world, with millions of active users.
We have just published three pages listing the new PvP Honor System rewards you can now purchase in your faction's barracks. Alliance characters need to seek out the Champions' Hall in Stormwind’s Old Town district, while members of the Horde should head to the Hall of Legends in Orgrimmar.
Blizzard has now made it available to purchase and download the US and EU version of The Burning Crusade. So those that do not have it yet, no need to go out and buy it in the store., just download it!
You can upgrade to the US version here and the EU version here.
Scions of Fate Beta Keys Available at the Stratics Network!
Stratics Network Announcement - 10:58 AM PST | Posted By: Lady Beth
Scions of Fate is entering into their next Closed Beta stage, and you have a chance to secure your very own beta key!That's right... you can participate in the closed beta stages. MGame and Stratics have teamed up tooffer you the chance to request a beta key for the third and final phase!
MGame recentlybrought us Legend of Ares and Hero. Now they bring Scions of Fate to join in their fantastic lineupof titles.
If you don't know of Scions of Fate, you're definitely missing out:
In China, Taiwan, and Thailand, Scions of Fate has received many ovations and has nowbecome a community that has members all throughout the countries. While bringing the joy ofmartial arts and garnering more fame in Asia has been a goal of Scions of Fate since thebeginning, it is now time for the whole world to experience the world of Scions of Fate.
So join the millions of others who are enjoying the fun and entertaining worldof Scions of Fate. Request your keytoday!
Upperdeck just announced that The Dark Portal will be available in Spanish and Italian on April 11th. Here is their announcement.
Starting with Through the Dark Portal™, the WoW® TCG will be available in Spanish and Italian on April 11th. This will extend the game’s reach beyond the current English, French, and German translations, helping to establish it throughout the world. Bruno Van Speybroeck, Director of Marketing and Product Development at Upper Deck Europe, is enthusiastic about what this means for the game. “We are very excited with these new additions and look forward to offering both the Spanish and Italian TCG players and World of Warcraft® fans a localized TCG.”
World of Warcraft Comic Contest Winner
This was announced over at the 
Ommra reported this on the 
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Short... dwarves... annoying-stay-in-your-head-music...
