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Creative Writing Contest Update!
Hey all you creative writers—MasterOfDisguise here!
Remember the
Creative Writing Contest
Blizzard had back in April? Well, Nethaera posted an update regarding the contest. Basically, the entries are being reviewed by the judges now, and the winners will be announced on Friday, May 22. The announcement will likely be placed either on Blizzard's
World of Warcraft home page
and/or their
General Discussion Forum
. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled then!
Take a look at the full announcement after the break!
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Children's Week 2009 (May 1 - May 7) - Quest Guide + Information!
Seldom in the World of Warcraft do we think that war is at hand, and for every fallen hero, there are a hundred commoners and civilians slain by beasts, agents of the Scourge, agents of the Old Gods, or even members of the opposite faction! In days like this, we, the heroes of Azeroth should take a bit of extra responsibility and do something beyond holding the monsters at bay, beyond slaughtering them, or restoring the health of our troops: we should take care of the numberless orphans left in the wake of this war.
Children's Week is upon us! A week in which we brave face a challenge greater than any undead monstrosity, a task more daunting than saving the world. We must become parents for all those orphans throughout Azeroth and make sure they are happy. We can't tank a child's fears, we can't heal its memories of pain, nor can we DPS the sorrow out of them. So equip your toys, make a mage conjure a candy table, fill your quiver with joy, load your gun with something colorful, and venture into the World of Parenting!
(Yes, the intro did come out as dramatic as you said it was, Argent
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Comic Quiz Contest!
Hey all you lore fanatics—MasterOfDisguise here!
This is kind of old news, but worth a post anyway! If you know World of Warcraft's lore inside and out, then you may have the chance to win a
World of Warcraft Action Figure
! Blizzard is hosting a
Comic Quiz Contest
. You can sign up and look at all of the rules
here
.
All the details to follow after the break!
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ZAM Rolls Out 'Free Realms' Site
So I know it's not always kosher to post non-WoW-related news up here, but I thought I would take the time to mention this one, because I'm personally kind of excited about this game.
For those of you who haven't heard yet, it's called
Free Realms
, and it's the most recent game from Sony Online Entertainment—the makers of the Everquest series, among several others. Free Realms is one of the first forays by a major US MMO publisher into the free-to-play space, and it actually looks pretty interesting. For once, here's a brand new major MMO that's NOT just trying to do the WoW thing in a different way—and since it's free, and it downloads and installs remarkably quickly, there's really no reason NOT to try it out. :)
Of course, when an awesome new game comes out, the folks here at the
ZAM Network
have to cover it, so ZAM has just rolled out it's brand new
Free Realms
site!
Relevant links:
The announcement on ZAM.com
[url=
http://www.zam.com/story
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World of...Papercraft?
So Malgayne has finally succumbed—and given me
POWAH
! Behold my fearsome wrath! All shall tremble before my might! Or...at least...my...blogging? *cough* Anyways, moving on to the actual post:
I would like to introduce a man to you, known as "Pascal." He is a "papercrafter" and has recently done an interview for Blizzard EU which can be viewed
here
. Some of his models he has created include: Thrall, a Kodo, a Gnome, an Abomination, and a golem. It's really amazing stuff that he does. The Thrall model, for instance, required
32
standard size pages. Imagine how long it takes to make these! This guy certainly has my respect.
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Taking an MMO Vacation? Come Back Soon!
Did you know over 11.5 million people were subscribed to World of Warcraft
before
the Ulduar 3.1 patch was released? Imagine how many more players have come back to the game since. It never ceases to amaze me how many people share in our joy playing what has become, apparently, the top massively multi-player online (MMO) game in the world.
What is it that attracts so many people for so long?
I'm not really sure myself. I love the atmosphere, the lore, and the friends I've made in-game. No matter what time of the week, month, or year I can always find something to do in Azeroth. In fact, I'm so Azeroth-ed out that I actually think I need an MMO vacation. Of course, I know whenever I get bored or a new patch is released, I always seem to come back.
Has the game ever gone stale for you? Been bored or took a break? What is it that keeps you coming back (or do you just love visiting Wowhead)?
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Noblegarden 2009 (Apr 26 - May 2) - Quest Guide + Information!
It's time yet another hunt for phat loot in World of Warcraft, this time in the form of brightly colored eggs! We join together to "
share the joy of life and friendship
" all the while meticulously hunting carefully hidden eggs and nomming tons of chocolate!
Eggs have been hidden all across the places of our youth (namely, the starting areas for the Alliance and Horde races) for both young and old to discover and perhaps even be rewarded with a
fabulous
prize
! Simply head out to one of your faction's starting areas, grab some quests, and get out there and hunt eggs! Maybe you'll even earn some achievements along the way!
Noblegarden
begins on
Sunday, April 26th
at 12:01 AM (server) and ends on
Saturday, May 2nd
at 11:59 PM.
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Argent Tournament Guide
Update: Patch 3.1.2 introduced new mounts and reduced costs for existing mounts! See the
Rewards
section for more details!
The cold winds of the north blow over the frigid icy glaciers of
Icecrown
. The sun barely reaches the frozen lands with its rays. The Lich King gathers his power, his Scourge minions planting destruction everywhere. Bloodthirsty Vrykul shout promises to eviscerate adventurers too foolish to enter their lands. Yet, in the northernmost corner of the great glacier, something defies the self-proclaimed true king's threats. Workers' sweat flows like rivers, as hired hands build a Coliseum. Mounts scream in pain or triumph as their riders - men and women representing all the peoples of Azeroth - fight to prove their worthiness to members of the
Argent Tournament
and their own war factions.
Despite the imminent danger of the Lich King, despite the hatred between King Varian and Garosh Hellscream, and despite the weather for which "harsh" would be a soft word, the heroes of Azeroth battle to determine who will f
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Val'anyr, Hammer of the Ancients Kings
A little while ago we gave you a blog about the new
Legendary Healing Mace
. Now we feel ready to give you something more - the actual
Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings
!
As we feed on dataz, you will be fed on information. Here is what we know about the Hammer of the Ancient Kings:
Val'anyr is only usable by healing classes - druid, paladin, priest, shaman. No hunter loot!
You need 30
Fragment of Val'anyr
to start its short quest chain.
Fragments of Val'anyr have a chance to drop off all the bosses in
Ulduar
, on
Heroic difficulty only
. This means you can only obtain the Hammer from Ulduar-25.
In
Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings
, the final quest, you will be given an item called Shattered Pieces of Val'anyr. You will need to
throw
those in
Yogg-Saron
's mouth while he is casting
Deafening Roar
. You also need to fight and defeat Yogg-Saron with 3 or fewer Watchers assisting you.
Obtaining the Hammer of the Ancients Kings awards not only the legendary item, but the feat of strength [url=/?achieve
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Wowhead 101 - Using Weightings!
I touched on this a little bit on my first post '
Wowhead 101 - Using Filters!
', but weightings are so powerful they need a post of their own.
What are weightings?
Weightings, simply put, are similar to a ranking system. They allow you to assign "point multipliers" to each stat type on an item.
How do these "point multipliers" work?
Well I'll give you an example. Say you have a filter like
this
(I've added a some custom filtering as well so it only shows 2 results). You can see that the 'Score' is identical for both items. You can play around with the multipliers I've given to see how it affects the score. For example, you could assign a better weighting to stamina over raw health, which is really useful if your class has a talent that affects stamina.
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Small Change
I was writing a bit recently on the nature of memory, and something occurred to me.
You remember that Level 60 Troll Warrior that gave you the last couple of gold you needed to buy your mount back when you were level 40?
I sure do, but the sad part is, I'm sure he doesn't remember you.
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My Problem with Varian Wrynn
As someone who "grew up" as Alliance,
Bolvar Fordragon
(shown here in his old digs at Stormwind Keep) was something of a fixture in the Alliance and generally his storyline, quests and dialog seemed to be pretty well-written. Aside from that, many of us appreciated how awesome he was when we first saw him fighting off the
Onyxia's Elite Guard
that were hiding in the keep, surrounding Bolvar.
These days, we're looking at
Varian Wrynn
instead. I didn't think too much of it when Wrynn first showed up, but then I read up on his lore and I found myself rather unhappy with the general nature of the story and his background. My gut reaction was to dismiss the lore behind him as being simply
badly written
. I wouldn't have a problem with him if the story didn't have the somewhat perplexing sense of an attempted shoe-horn of a new character into WoW. I use the word perplexing because the word was used by the loquacious, frenetic and not-sa
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GDC 2009
A little while ago, as some of you may know, I was at
GDC
San Francisco (Game Developers Conference), and while there, I learned a lot about gamer culture.
Now, E3 is and always has been a press event—an event where game companies get to show off the new cool stuff that they're doing to the public and to each other. GDC, though, is an industry event—where it's mostly about meeting other people in the industry, awarding innovation in games, and the new middleware type stuff that's out there. Being someone who works in the game industry, and only a short drive away from San Francisco, I just had to be there.
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We Made The List!
So
I Heart Chaos
has named us one of the
100 Best Websites of the Past 100 Years!
I don't know how stiff the competition was, since I can't think of too many websites that were around 100 years ago, but it's still flattering to be named. :)
Here's what they had to say about us:
With over 10 million World of Warcraft players, there's a huge need for tips, maps, articles and information on items and abilities. Thottbot used to be the standard, but Wowhead appeared and suddenly made searching for anything any everything WoW-related easy and intuitive.
Thanks guys!
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Crossover Circus! With Prizes to Boot!
Many of you are familiar with many, many MMOs. From EverQuest to Dark Age of Camelot to The Matrix Online and everything else in between. Oh, and Warcraft! Others of us, however, are only familiar with a few, if even just one.
Zam.com
is hosting an Age of Conan
contest
called the "Venture into Hyboria." To enter, you visit their forum thread and write a short back story explaining how your MMO avatar made it to Hyboria. It can be serious, funny, or silly - some of you who are more inclined to back stories and RP might get a kick out of it! One lucky grand prize winner will get a GameRigs
custom desktop gaming PC system
in an Age of Conan case!
"Age of Conan", what?! Well, sort of. The idea of the contest is that your character from your favorite MMO (WoW, DAoC, whatever!) ventures into Hyboria, a setting for Age of Conan. Think of it as a cameo appearance by your character in another game!
Here's a
direct link
to the Zam.com forums. You want more prizes
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Wowhead Comic #18
Ding ding, me again.
This week's script was written by and stars Koren (the BE priest lady). She's been hunting that darn
Time-Lost Proto Drake
for gosh knows how long, (so have I /sadface) and is frustrated how quickly it is snapped up by other people in the hunt for it.
So, good luck to her, and I hope she bags herself this prize mount soon. <3 (and me too)
Note: Please, for the sake of her sanity and mine, pretty please don't reply to this blog post saying, OH I HAVE ONE, I FOUND IT SO-SO EASILY, etc etc. Or blood vessels will burst. And she might stab me in the head with a pen. And, uh, ignore the fact she can't actually use a crossbow ingame, for comic purposes it's nifty and cute.
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So...Now What?
So! It appears that
Yogg-Saron is already down
.
Now this makes me wonder. Does this mean that Ulduar, like the rest of Naxx's raiding scene, is too easy? 2 days is very fast to bring down Ol' Yoggy, after all (although Algalon is still undefeated).
And yet, this is how it was supposed to go, wasn't it? The regular content is supposed to be easy for the hardcore player, to be accessible for people who are still casual places. Should we be measuring based on the hard mode achievements?
I'm honestly not sure. What do you guys think, hm?
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WoW Quiz in Parade Magazine
So I was approached by
Parade magazine
a few days ago, asking me to create a World of Warcraft themed quiz for their magazine!
The quiz is now live on their website, under the
Celebrity Quizzes
section (I'm a celebrity! Who knew?). Feel free to head on over to the
World of Warcraft
quiz and give it a shot! I tried to create some questions that non WoW players could try, leading up to a few slightly more challenging ones.
Go try it here:
http://www.parade.com/celebrity/quiz/editors-picks/world-of-warcraft.html
Then post your score!
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Ulduar Bosses (Part I)
Hello, there, eager and not-so-eager raiders and readers!
Patch 3.1 is upon us! And with it, I feel confident enough to present to you something new. For the first time in Wowhead's history, we have boss information and strategies, fresh from the PTR, as soon as the patch hits the Live realms!
Without further ado, I give you
Ulduar
, updated with articles for three quarters of the bosses we have
any
information about!
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Wowhead: Talent and Pet Calculators Upgraded!
So in the process of building the code to support the upcoming profiling tool, we discovered that a few upgrades needed to be made to our trusty old
talent calculator
. In honor of the release of
Patch 3.1
, we've decided to release a few of our upgrades a little early. :)
Introducing our shiny new upgraded
Talent
and
Pet
Calculators! You'll notice a number of fancy new changes, but here are the ones we're most excited about:
Glyphs:
Our talent calculator now supports glyphs! Of special note: we used the glyph calculator for a while in beta and discovered that, while pretty, the normal glyph icons are frequently hard to identify at a glance—so we tweaked the glyphs to actually use the icon of the
modified spell
, rather than the glyph icon itself. Much easier to use!
Automatic Updating:
No more "link" button! The URL of the Talent and Pet Calculators now automatically updates whenever you add or remove a point—all you have to do is copy/paste the URL, and you're there!
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