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According to the Shanghaidaily 500 000 mostly young chinese men are living from playing online games. They farm virtual money or items and sell it for real money to mostly European or American Players.
This is no news really for someone who plays online games. The real surprise was only the large number. How many people are too lazy to farm their own items if 500000 chinese can live from that?
Blizzard Insider has published an Interview about the past and upcoming changes to the PvP System with Lead Game Designer Tom Chilton. It covers these hihglights:
Read the Full transcript here or download and listen to the Interview here.
But it’s nice knowing that when I see something that feels broken, there’s something that can be done about it. It also helps me stay in touch with the player base because, like a lot of other players, I’m part of a guild. I hear people that are in the guild saying, „This particular aspect of the game feels screwy, and I really don’t like how it works,“ etc. If I hear that enough, it’s very easy for me to say to myself, „You know what, I think this is really something that needs to be improved or changed.“
Haha. I wonder how many players will now start to whine in their guildchat if they want a change 😉
The temporary item buffs (e.g. poisons, sharpening stones and shaman weapon buffs) introduced in Patch 1.11 will no longer persist through zoning or logging out.
„Players will notice in the latest PTR update that a change was made to the functionality of temporary item buffs (e.g. poisons, sharpening stones and shaman weapon buffs.) While we only just recently allowed the affects of these temporary item buffs to persist upon zoning and logging out, due to the extra demand it was placing on our hardware we’ve decided that for the time being, it was best to revert the change. We do anticipate this functionality will be available again once the anticipated hardware upgrades have been completed in preparation for the Burning Crusade’s release.
We thank you for your understanding.“ – Nethaera
Well, I really enjoyed not having to put on poisons every zoning, but apparently Blizzards „excellent“ Hardware cannot deal with it. If it was not that sad it would actually be funny.
Exisitngs Guilds will suffer from a dramatic changes to high end raiding in the upcoming expansion Burning Crusade. The new instances will be most likely limited to 10 and 25 players only.
„In Burning Crusade, end game raiding (which occupies WoW’s max level players) will be done in groups of 25 or 10. Illidan’s Black Temple, the most challenging raid instance that will appear in Burning Crusade (at release), has a 25-player limit.“ – 1up.com
„I always thought that larger parties enforce more specific roles for the individual. People spam bolts to maximize dps, not because it’s necessarily fun.
The roles have been specific in large groups and now we are just making individual contribution more significant. The fact that you don’t have backup healers stacked 3 or 4 high means your hybrid classes will feel more pressure in various situations. Each player’s efforts are more distinct in a smaller group.
Bottom line, smaller groups make for a more functional game. Everyone gains more opportunity for participation.
And when people get to choose stats through socketed itemization, that aims towards hybrid classes making armor for their play style.
So, to answer the question directly, 5/10/25 player caps helps hybrid functionality and utility a lot. ;)“ – Tseric (Blizzard)
In my eyes this change is not good at all. Existing Guilds will have more arguments and whining on who is going to be able to join the raids. They will be forced to split well working teams in primary and secondary groups (do you want to be in a secondary group?) or to drop members. For this reason I do not really see how I will even be allowed to join for the new instances to „contribute“ with my poor equipped alt Druid while 15 members are envious looking at my spot in a raid. I suppose I will be stuck to play my Rogue forever if I ever want to see this content. Its bad when developpers never play their own high end content in an existing guild and plan these things without realizing what effect this will cause on people.
It has become impossible to join a group to the non raid instances if you are a feral druid already with the limits introduced a while back. Also Rogues and Hunters have a hard time finding groups. I fear that these changes will begin to show same effect on raid instances.
I wonder about the real thought behind of all this. Is the size of a raid reason of the massive lagspikes we recently encountered on our Realms? Too many people at the same time in the same intances for the existing server hardware? Are there too many ct-raidassist messages flooding the servers when playing in large groups? Does Blizzard think with this limit there will eventually be less players or players will be spread around more?
Anyway there is nothing that can be done about this anyhow, but all these coming changes make me feel uneasy about the future of World of Warcraft and I am enjoying to play my Lineage II Spellhowler more and more.
On my research about „Warden“ (Blizzards anticheating tool, that monitors a players system for suspicious processes) I stumbled over the „Governor„, a monitor tool that shows which action is performed by warden. I know this is old news for some, but the awareness of the base of players is not very high about this. Considering the amount of 59.000 banned accounts this june I figured it was worth some mention,
„This software is known as the ‚warden client‘ – it’s written like shellcode in that it’s position independant. It is downloaded on the fly from Blizzard’s servers, and it runs about every 15 seconds. It is one of the most interesting pieces of spyware to date, because it is designed only to verify compliance with a EULA/TOS. Here is what it does, about every 15 seconds, to about 4.5 million people (500,000 of which are logged on at any given time)“
Hoglund, author of the Governor, says he watched the warden „sniff down the email addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that I had open at the time, and the names of all my running programs, including those that were minimized or in the toolbar“
Further Information can be foun in this article on P2P.net and on the Homepage of the Governor.
As Eyonix stated in the US World of Warcraft Forums. Blizzard enforces harsh politics versus cheater, goldfarmer and user of 3rd party software. 59.000 Accounts with a total of 22.000.000 Gold have been banned this June.
As part of our efforts to eliminate cheating from World of Warcraft, we recently banned approximately 59,000 World of Warcraft accounts in the month of June, and with that removed well over 22 million gold from the total economy across all realms. While we regret having to take such extreme action, these accounts were participating in activities that directly violated World of Warcraft’s Terms of Use, including the use of third-party programs to farm gold and items. Such behavior not only negatively impacts the economy of a realm, it diminishes the achievements of those who play legitimately. We will continue to aggressively monitor all World of Warcraft realms in order to protect the service and our players from the harmful effects of cheating.
I merely wonder why the European World of Warcraft Team is not as rigorous. They have more players, but ban much less Accounts.
36 Realms are now eligible for Realmtransfer. Read the list of available Realms here.
„The Paid Character Transfer feature allows you to move characters to other realms as well as between two accounts where you are the original registered owner, subject to certain restrictions. The cost of each paid character transfer is 19.99€ / £14.99.“
More Information about the restrictions can be found here.
For the first 100 lucky internet users France Telecom is testing fast FTTH (Fiber To The Home) internet access with 2.5 Gigabit/s download and 1.5 Gigabit/s upload. The customers located in the Paris area pay 70€ a month for Internet, digital television and telephone flatrate.
Read on here(German) for further Information or browse the Site of France Telecom.
Due to technical issues the maintenance for the realms listed below will be delayed. We do not, at this time, have an ETA on when these realms will be up. We apologise for the inconvenience we know this is causing.
Ahn’Qiraj
Bronzebeard
Chromaggus
Dentarg
Drak’thul
Emeriss
Executus
Hakkar
Khadgar
Kor’gall
Kul Tiras
Mazrigos
Moonglade
Scarshield Legion
Steamwheedle Cartel
Talnivarr
Trollbane
Xavius
Read the Posting here.
Blizzard has given World of Warcraft Warcry an exclusive information on lore and background surrounding Tempest Keep, a dungeon available in the Burning Crusade expansion. Learn here how it was possible for the Blood Elves to rush on Tempest Keep.