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Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
| Time |
Event |
| 9:45a |
Fishing for rewards: New patch geared to fishers One of my favorite secondary professions in "World of Warcraft" is fishing. While some might find it way too time-consuming or even boring, for me it's a good break from doing dailies, running dungeons and fighting in raids.
Fishing is important because some of the best foods that provide buffs to statistics are made from one or more kinds of fish that can be caught in the various zones.
This is particularly important for raid situations, in which one of the best food buffs is the Fish Feast, which requires three different kinds of fish plus northern spices. The feast can be dropped before fights and every player in the raid can sit down and "eat." After 10 seconds, all players get boosts to attack power (for melee classes) and spell power (for casters), as well as an increase to stamina by 40 points.
My guild depends on me, and a few others, to have Fish Feasts available for every raid, and enough of them to last throughout the raid, so I spend a lot of time fishing.
You also can catch crates that contain ore, leather scraps or cloth, all of which can be used or sold on the auction house for some extra money. And since many payers can cook recipes but either don't want to spend time fishing or don't have a high enough fishing level to catch needed fish, some types of fish sell quite well in the auction house -- up to 50 or even 65 wow gold for a stack of 20.
New quests
There currently is one fishing quest available as a daily quest, which gives wow gold and other rewards. However, it's an Outlands daily, so not too many people complete it regularly.
That's why it's good news for many, including me, that the 3.1 patch will include a Dalaran fishing daily, which will feature five different quests for Northrend areas.
The reward for successful completion of the quest will be a Bag of Fishing Treasures, which can include any of a number of goodies, including three new fishing poles, high quality gems to boost abilities, novelty items and grey-colored "junk" items that can be sold to vendors for anywhere from 1 gold to 100 gold.
Other changes
According to MMO Champion, the following changes to fishing will also be made in the patch:
There will be a very rare mount that can drop from· Northrend fishing pools.
You can now fish in Wintergrasp. The giant· darkwater clam can be fished up in Wintergrasp. It has a higher chance to drop pearls, and gives up to five times the regular amount of clam meat.
· Artisan fishing no longer requires the Nat Pagle quest, which instead will give a special superior-quality fishing pole.
It will take less time to catch· fish.
You can now fish anywhere, no matter what your skill level is. All· catches can increase your skill, but if you fish in areas too high for your current skill, you're likely to catch junk items.
Fishing skills once· taught from books are now taught by fishing trainers.
So if you don't already fish or have a high enough level of fishing ability ... start leveling it now to be ready for all the goodies offered by the patch.
Duane M. George is Digital/Community Editor of the Pacific Daily News and a "World of Warcraft" addict.
| | 9:50a |
The Lonely Crowd Get too comfortable with the constant forum chatter, 24-hour news and viral marketing initiatives, and it's easy to forget that the first videogames were meant to be experienced in relative isolation. Developers presumed that when you stepped up to the arcade cabinet or plopped down in front of your TV screen, you knew little more than what the game told you. While you toiled away with their creations, they remained firmly behind the curtain.
In such a relationship, you could easily overlook or even willfully ignore a game's faults. When I played the original Mario Kart, it didn't really register with me that only half the racers were competitive past the 100cc difficulty level. That was a "feature" to me, not a game-balance issue. I also hardly noticed that certain weapons in Doom were basically game-breaking, effective at almost all ranges and against all enemies. If you hoarded enough plasma rifle ammo going into it, the epic confrontation with the Cyberdemon became a one-minute massacre.
Before the internet created the collective gamer and allowed for the post-release patch, developers could get away with anything short of a Battlecruiser 3000AD-level meltdown. Their jobs became a lot harder when gamers ceased to be a lonely crowd and started behaving like a hive mind. True, most of the gaming community's collective effort has traditionally been wasted on machinima and fanboy wars, but it only takes a small group of passionate fans to dissect a game and expose everything that makes it tick.
For example, take the three-way relationship between a studio like Blizzard, its mass audience (which includes me) and its hardcore fans and critics. While my own ability to unearth World of Warcraft's or StarCraft's secrets is nonexistent, Blizzard has to face the certainty that there are thousands of people who are eager to explain anything and everything that I might have missed.
People like my friend Zach, who became intolerable as Diablo II's release date approached. Almost every time I connected to the internet, an AIM window would pop up with a link to the latest bit of information he'd mined from the fansites.
"Check it out: Some guys cooked up this program that lets you plan your character," he would say. "I've got my necro planned up through Level 30. He's going to be unstoppable."
"Yeah?" I was really sick of hearing about it.
"Yeah. But here's the thing - I've worked through all the possible class-skill combos and I'm pretty sure he becomes game-breaking if he's paired with a paladin casting auras."
"Really."
"So here's what I want you to do ..."
"I have to do something?"
"Not much," he quickly assured me. "Just roll your paladin right now."
At the time, I had no intention of getting Diablo II. It wasn't really my bag and frankly, my friend's dedication frightened me a little. Think about Jonestown, or Tom Cruise on Oprah, and you've pretty much got the picture of him before every Blizzard release since Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.
"Man, I dunno. We don't even know when it's coming out for sure."
"Look, just roll your paladin. I've got to see how these two go together."
"Why can't you do it yourself?"
"Because you're going to be playing the paladin, and you need to be comfortable with the character. So make him yours. Then let me know how you spec him."
Guys like my friend Zach are the reverse of Cypher in The Matrix. They stop seeing the games and start seeing engines, probability tables, dice rolls and modifiers. He once interrupted my account of a recent StarCraft match to explain the absurdity of my Firebat-centric strategy.
"Look, unless you've got a guy coming at you with Zerglings, the Firebat is just taking up space in your bunkers. That fire animation looks nice, but that's about all it has going for it." Then he went into a detailed explanation of how StarCraft calculated splash damage, did a range comparison of the Firebat to other units like Hydralisks and finished by explaining that after their first armor upgrade, Zerg units were far less vulnerable to area-of-effect weaponry.
By the time he stopped talking, I had failed shop class.
People like Zach are also likely to participate in betas and leave detailed (some might say obsessive) messages on the developers' forums explaining exactly what they feel is out of whack, how that one small problem drastically upsets the balance of the game and what should be done to fix it. Although developers are free to ignore these observations, it's telling that Blizzard has instead become notorious for tweaking its games for years following release.
Prior to the internet, someone like Zach could only deconstruct so many games at once, and he couldn't share his knowledge with more people than he could corner at school. But once we were all plugged into the same the stream of information, he and his kindred spirits began to change gaming. The reality of gaming in the last 15 years is that gamers can instantly find help with a difficult section of a game - or, at the very least, some assurance that others have experienced the same problem. The game is stripped bare by the collective scrutiny of the smartest players and the suspicions of the laymen.
Last month I played a mediocre action game and came to an infuriating boss fight that forced me to fall back on a walkthrough, a tactic that always leaves me feeling a little dirty. The first link from Google read, "OK, now get ready for the crappiest boss battle you've ever played." Five minutes later, I uninstalled the game. It had been exposed as a fraud, relying on an unreasonably punishing enemy that required several levels' warning and preparation.
There is no longer any hiding the sins of game design. If a game uses cheap tricks, takes shortcuts to artificially challenge the player or contains extraneous or redundant elements, a few people will catch on - and they'll be more than happy to tell plenty of other gamers who would likely never have noticed anything was wrong.
That's not necessarily a good thing. I sometimes worry that we're all turning into amateur game designers and forgetting to be good audience members. I never heard the phrase "game balance issues" in my first decade as a gamer, but now it comes up constantly. I recently read a great piece on Steve Gaynor's blog about what a good shooter combat arena looks like, which contributed enormously to my understanding of why I've loved certain shooters and been left cold by others. His understanding of how we play and approach encounters in a shooter is superb, but once you've read his explanation you can't help but see the landscape of every shooter you play through the new, more critical lens Gaynor provides in his piece.
It doesn't necessarily lessen my enjoyment of games like F.E.A.R. or Half-Life, but it gives me an unshakable sense of intentionality. Because I have access to so many people more thoughtful and analytical than myself, the people who made my games have started to become a part of my experience. When I'm sprinting across some machine gun-swept plaza in a Call of Duty game, racing for an abandoned car or a heavy planter to hide behind, I now sense the designers' hand behind my next piece of cover. Suddenly, the maelstrom of war begins to resemble a carefully laid-out playground, as meticulously planned as a paintball court - and about as threatening.
On balance, however, I happily welcome the game-makers and skill-players into my experience if it means I'm getting a better product. A carefully structured game may seem a little too perfect, too devoid of reassuring chaos, but it will likely be more fun to play. It will also probably continue to get better as Zach and the rest of the gamer Overmind commence their exploiting, flaming, whining and explaining.
| | 9:53a |
Conference kicks around serious work of gaming
Turns out video games are serious business.
Just ask the hundreds of developers, educators and gamers who attended yesterday's Game-based Learning and Simulations Conference at Red River College's Princess Street campus.
The event, hosted by Game On Manitoba, featured a full slate of speakers who specialize in developing video games as education and training tools.
"Remember the first time you played Tetris, how you dreamed about it afterward? That was your brain getting smarter," said Khal Shariff, CEO of Project Whitecard, a Winnipeg company specializing in so-called serious games.
Though it's still a burgeoning field, serious games -- computer simulations, in particular -- have already been used to train surgeons, soldiers and even astronauts.
Health-related games like Nintendo's Wii Fit are already a hit with pre-schoolers to senior citizens alike, and now serious games are being embraced as educational tools in the classroom.
"They have the ability to engage people, to interest them, to influence their behaviour and all together, (they) prove to be more effective than traditional ways of learning," said David Wortley, director of the Serious Games Institute at Coventry University in the U.K.
Shariff's Project Whitecard is already working with the Canadian Space Agency on a game that will deliver mathematics to Grades Five and 11 classrooms, and he was recently tapped by NASA to help develop a new massive multi-player online game -- something he says will be on par with World of Warcraft.
| | 10:24a |
How To Become A Video Game Tester - Can You Really Get Paid To Test Games? This article will deal with the age old question: “How To Become A Video Game Tester?!”, which some people say is possible and others say it is like an urban legend.
Well what is the truth?
Can you really become a Video Game Tester?
Well yes you can!
Although it is not as easy as just going down to your local job center and looking through a list of vacancies, as I am sure you will already know you do not see many video game tester jobs there!
Although that is not to say that they do not exsist!
You can get a video game tester job and all you need to do is start looking up some major software companies online and writing to them asking if they have any vacancies.
Obviously if you have some good ranking on an online game like Halo or World of warcraft then by all means let them know!
Another way you can start becoming a video game tester of sorts is by making a blog and reviewing the top games and also getting involved with the major gaming communities like gamespot.com and other major gaming websites.
Of course this is alot of work and if you are truly serious about learning How To Become A Video Game Tester then it is a good idea to find a guide that will not only tell you how to do this step by step but more important then that it will give you a full database of video game tester job vacancies and the number and email to contact them!
You can work your way up to making a nice income from being a video game tester and don’t get me wrong you MUST enjoy playing games ALOT but it can be very rewarding and an excellent stepping stone on to different jobs within the industry!
Click the link below and find out more about how you can land your first Video Game Tester Job within a week:
| | 10:25a |
Counter Strike does not teach teen violence
Intense debates are being held after the Winnenden tragedy over how acts of violence by teenagers could potentially be prevented. Lower Saxony wants to inhibit the illegal sales of violent video games to minors. Experts believe this to be wrong.
The Public Attorney’s Office of Stuttgart has launched an investigation into the father of the 17-year-old Winnenden gunman for manslaughter. Tim K.’s father, a member of a shooting club, had 4,600 rounds of ammunition stored in the family home and the weapon used in the shooting spree was kept in the parents’ bedroom – against regulation – and not in the safe with the other 14 weapons he owned.
Tim K. took the unsecured weapon from the bedroom. The Public Attorney’s Office believes that Tim’s father should have recognized his son was proned to violence because of his diagnosed depression.
In the meantime, debates are running rampant about what measures could prevent future acts of violence by teenagers. Lower Saxony is demanding a major change in the manner in which the addiction of computer games in minors is dealt with. The underlying reason for this is a survey undertaken by the Kriminologischen Forschungsintituts Niedersachsen (KFN – the criminal research institute of Lower Saxony), through which it has been determined that 14,000 9th graders in Germany are addicted to video games, especially to computer role games such as World of Warcraft as well as so-called killer games like Counter Strike.
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The state government wants to contain the sales of violent games to minors through under cover test sales. According to investigators, Tim K. was playing a so-called killer game the night before the rampage.
These test sales are set to function in the same way as they do for uncovering the sales of alcohol to minors. If a game is illegally sold to a minor the shop owners or salesmen could face a fine of up to 50,000 euros.
In the survey, presented by KFN Director Christian Pfeiffer, 44,610 9th graders were questioned about their internet and computer game habit. The survey found that 4.3 percent of the girls and 15.8 percent of the boys had an “excessive” playing habits with more than 4.5 hours spent on the computer every day. 14,000 9th graders were classified as addicted to computer games with 23,000 more in serious danger of becoming addicted. The total number minors that have been classified as addicted to computer games, Pfeiffer said, was around 50,000 to 60,000.
Minister for Social Affairs Mechthild Ross-Luttmann said she would present her suggestion of the under cover test sales at the next national conference with other youth and social ministers. It is shocking, she said, how easily children have access to games that are not appropriate for their age.
Ross-Luttmann also aims to achieve a general age restriction for addictive computer games. World of Warcraft, for example – available to minors at the age of 12 – might in the near future only be sold to adults. In addition to this, parents need to be further sensibilized. “Parents must know what danger potential exists in their children’s bedrooms,” Ross-Luttmann said.
Computer game expert and author of „Digital Paradise“ Andreas Rosenfelder is rather skeptical about demands like this. “I don’t see a connection between digital role playing games like World of Warcraft and shooting sprees,” he said. World of Warcraft is a game set in medieval times in which the protagonists can take on the roles of dwarfs, elves and wizards. There is no shooting in this game.
"In heated debates there can easily be some confusion,“ Rosenfelder said. Games like Counter Strike – where the gamer plays through the eyes of a heavily armed character and kills as many enemies as possible – need to be kept an eye on. These types of games are called Ego Shooter. Rosenfelder says an excessive consumption of these games will have side effects.
A cultural pattern has come into existence because of the school shootings in the years gone by. Rosenberg says, though, that this pattern can not be stopped just because things are now to be forbidden. He believes that whoever has the potential to see the world through hateful eyes will find a way through which to get rid of the aggression – whether it be through computer games or something else. The behavior that could lead to a shooting spree, Rosenberg says, can not be learned through a game like Counter Strike.
| | 10:26a |
The First Real MMO For my part, I saw Ultima Online as a logical next step from the MUDs I played in college in the early 90s. I was pretty far gone into a couple of TinyMUCKs back then. (I just checked and I do, in fact, still have my wiz bit on PegasusMuck.) When called on to date the start of the MMO I usually give two answers: UO was the first commercial success.
This morning I read a post by Dusty Monk where he described the forces that were working to push the Halo MMO toward "WoW in Space":
"For me personally, this was probably one of the most conflicting parts of working on Titan. Don’t get me wrong — I’d wanted to work on an MMO for as long as long as I’ve been in games, and this was the dream game of a lifetime. But while there were a few of us that had played MMO’s before WoW, by far and large, as the team grew, most of the people on the team had never played a single MMO before WoW. This led to a dilemma that the entire team struggled with throughout the lifetime of the project. And it’s a dilemma I think every team out there that’s designing an MMO today has to struggle with, and the actual point of this post, which I’m only just now actually getting around to: How much do you copy the genre leader?
Dusty's actual question is a good one, but that isn't what really caught my eye. You see, while we were building Pirates of the Burning Sea we had a similar dynamic to our team. World of Warcraft came out two years after we started, so nobody had played it.
Instead we had one designer who figured that the MMO genre started with EverQuest where most of the rest of us pegged that event at some earlier game. This guy refused to acknowledge Ultima Online as a "real" MMO despite its hundreds of thousands of subscribers and massive success. He thought even less of the games that came before it: The Realm, Meridian 59, and the thousands of MUDs.
MUDs (starting with MUD1, I guess) were the origin of the design genre. To me the distinction is important because of all the ways that MUDs break when your playerbase is counted in the tens of thousands instead of hundreds. UO was really the first game to deal with that kind of scale in the design, so it was the first "real" MMO.
It shouldn't surprise me that there are people working on MMOs today that consider World of Warcraft the first real example of this kind of game. It has thirty or fourty times the number of subscribers that EverQuest had at its peak.
That increase changed the dynamics of the game just as much as the previous 30-40x jump made EverQuest and Ultima Online different from the games that preceeded them. My only fear is that this will drive more companies into direct competition with WoW (and the $40 million plus games that are intended to compete with it) instead of toward building a nice tidy business aimed at a niche of 100,000 to 300,000 players who are craving something different.
What is your answer when you are trying to come up with the first real MMO?
| | 10:27a |
A Look At The World of Warcraft Profession Engineering Engineering is a very playful and fanciful profession. You can produce all sorts of insane things that are fun to use and also amuse and bewilder other players.If you are planning on becoming an engineer, you should likely already be a miner. Miners gather ore and smelt ore into bars to make the bulk of engineering items. Engineer recipes frequently include jewels, which are encountered in a variety of places. Typically, most engineers purchase or are given rare jewels from other players.Engineering is used to assemble metal and stones into components necessary to build explosives, guns, scopes, bullets, mechanical dragons, aquatic helmets, and much more. More than any other profession, engineering products demands several steps to be finished. Buy cheapest wow gold here !
The engineering trainer has some very cool engineering plans. Nevertheless, there are many more interesting and desirable plans out there to find from monster drops.Trainers are located at springspindle fizzlegear found in ironforge, tinkertown for the alliance. For the horde, roxxik is located in orgrimmar.After you think you have mastered engineering, you are offered a chance to specialize in either gnomish or goblin Engineering. You must first reach 200 skill and level 35. Alliance players can then speak to lilliam sparkspindle in stormwind city. Horde players can talk to tinkerwiz in ratchet. Then you will be offered some quests to open new recipes for that school of engineering.
Engineering is a very playful and fanciful profession. You can produce all sorts of insane things that are fun to use and also amuse and bewilder other players.If you are planning on becoming an engineer, you should likely already be a miner. Miners gather ore and smelt ore into bars to make the bulk of engineering items. Engineer recipes frequently include jewels, which are encountered in a variety of places. Typically, most engineers purchase or are given rare jewels from other players.Engineering is used to assemble metal and stones into components necessary to build explosives, guns, scopes, bullets, mechanical dragons, aquatic helmets, and much more. More than any other profession, engineering products demands several steps to be finished. Buy wow gold here !
The engineering trainer has some very cool engineering plans. Nevertheless, there are many more interesting and desirable plans out there to find from monster drops.Trainers are located at springspindle fizzlegear found in ironforge, tinkertown for the alliance. For the horde, roxxik is located in orgrimmar.After you think you have mastered engineering, you are offered a chance to specialize in either gnomish or goblin Engineering. You must first reach 200 skill and level 35. Alliance players can then speak to lilliam sparkspindle in stormwind city. Horde players can talk to tinkerwiz in ratchet. Then you will be offered some quests to open new recipes for that school of engineering.
| | 10:31a |
Gazillion's quest: A killer Lego online game, World of Warcraft-style Nirvana for the video game industry looks a lot like World of Warcraft, except without the arcane rules that mystify the average player.
That vision is the driving force behind Lego Universe, a new online game based on the building bricks franchise that's scheduled for release in 2010. Developed by a San Mateo company called Gazillion Entertainment, the game is designed so even your 5-year-old and his grandfather can play together. Gazillion, which has been operating in stealth since 2005, is also working on an online superhero game based on its license with Marvel Entertainment.
The goal is to make virtual world games that anyone can play. It's a financially hazardous terrain, previously explored by many companies before Gazillion, including NC Soft, whose Tabula Rasa game, designed by Ultima Online creator Richard Garriott, shut down March 1. These types of games are difficult and expensive to build. They're even more arduous to maintain once tens of thousands of players pile in, uncovering and exploiting every bug in the game.
The potential payoff is a glittering pot of wow gold Consider World of Warcraft, a game ...
... developed by Blizzard Entertainment in Irvine. It has 11.5 million subscribers, each paying about $15 a month to play. That's $172.5 million a month, more than $2 billion a year, in fees alone. The game disc, which makes a regular appearance on the weekly list of top-10 best-selling PC games, brings in another $20 a copy. Not bad for a title that's more than 4 years old.
It's no surprise that the game genre, known as Massively Multiplayer Online games, or MMOs, is a hotbed of development. MMORPG.com lists 253 such games, many of which are in development. With such a crowded field, one way to cut through the noise is a well-known license. Both LEGO and Marvel fit that bill, said Ted Pollak, senior analyst with Jon Peddie Research in San Francisco.
"I think there is a big opportunity for mass-market MMO’s, especially when they are connected to recognized brands," Pollak said. But, he warned, "the quality of the game must be top notch, which is not an easy undertaking."
Gazillion Chief Executive Rob Hutter said his company has recruited 300 developers, many of whom have worked for Sony Online Entertainment, Blizzard, NC Soft, Walt Disney and other seasoned MMO studios.
"We worked hard to create a game experience that is easy to learn, but also offers depth for even the hardest-core players," said Hutter, who said his developers spent some time figuring out why Nintendo's Mario franchise continues to pull in new players while maintaining its base of serious gamers.
Among the changes Gazillion made: shorter game sessions so players can jump in and out in five or 10 minutes, easier ways to move around the virtual world, more intuitive menus and fun ways for old-timers to interact with newbies.
"When you look at World of Warcraft, it's largely a hard-core gamer phenomenon," Hutter said. "We think there's an enormous opportunity for an MMO that can penetrate the mass market."
A worthy quest.
Spectral Safari Tournament Results, World of Warcraft Miniatures
Saturday, March 14, 2009, Battlezone Comics hosted a World of Warcraft Miniatures tournament called Spectral Safari. The first place prize was the coveted and highly prized, Spectral Tiger loot card, which gives one character a spectral tiger mount.
There were 32 contestants with a multi-layer elimination grid. The competition was fierce, especially because no one was able to bring in their tried and true teams from previous competitions. Each player received a single booster pack and had to make a team with two of the minis from that pack.
The competition started at 12:00 p.m. and lasted until around 7:00 p.m. that night. After many games, a winner was declared. Derek Campbell won the tournament of 32 contestants, with a record of seven wins and one loss. The miniatures he used were Thangal, a Tauren druid, and Ji’lan, a Troll rogue.
This was the only tournament in the city, in the state, and the first of such tournaments at Battlezone Comics. This was also Derek’s first win in a tournament of such magnitude.
To protect the card, it will be shipped to Derek directly from the company. The first 25 contestants to sign up received a special edition Ashenvale map. And there was a drawing for a Red Bearon Loot Card, which is also a mount card. The winner of this drawing was Christopher Burns.
Chris said he was going to take the card to his home, log into the game and add it to his main’s list of mounts. He intended to raid with the mount and show his guild what he had won.
Derek, though he really wanted to keep the card, has decided to offer it for sale and make an investment into a family business.
On a personal note, not as an Examiner, but as a parent, I am proud to announce that Derek is my son and it is my own business that he will be investing in. He has made the entire family proud, not only with his decision, but because he was able to play a game he really enjoys and win at it. We wish him the best of luck in all future tournaments and will support him in his future attempts.
Congratulations, Derek!
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