Joystiq Sheds Light on Burning Crusade Expansion
The Burning Crusade, the official expansion to Blizzards epic MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW), is chock-full of long-awaited goodies. Besides flying mounts and the increased level cap of 70, there’s also plenty of PvP modification:
Blizzard sets a new Banning Record!
In a mere 25 days, Blizzard managed to ban about 59,000 World of Warcraft accounts. This topped the 30,000 or so for the May bannings. From the horse’s mouth:
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.
Once again, I maintain that this is excessive, unsubstantiated, and perhaps motivated by corporate greed (i.e., Blizzard wants a less expensive hosting bill).
Burning Crusade gives WoW players Alliance shamans, Horde paladins
Burning Crusade, the official Blizzard expansion to the highly-acclaimed World of Warcraft, will add classes that were previously exclusive to either the Alliance or Horde race to the opposing faction. That means that the Alliance players will be able to have Shamans, which used to be a Horde-only class. Likewise, the Horde will now be able to play as Paladins. The justification for the cross-over of exclusive classes between opposing races is that there are new Dungeons that require the unique abilities of both Shamans and Paladins–thus spoke Blizzard. The down side of this idea is that now neither the Horde, nor the Alliance has a unique class, which seems like a rather bad thing to me.
WoW Offline, Unavailable, Down
I think it’s unacceptable for any MMORPG to ever have “down-time,” and especially World of Warcraft, the most advanced of its kind. Consumers are paying $15 or so a month, and they have the reasonable expectation to be able to play their game whenever they wish, and for how long they want. Of course, Blizzard can do whatever it so desires, but it would be nice if WoW’s maintenance were seamless, such that it never interrupted or disturbed actual gameplay. You can check the status of your realm here.
Above is a screenshot of WoW as of this morning, with its notification of a 6-hour downtime for today. That means the masses of eager gamers cannot play for 25% of today, yet they are paying the full subscription fee. Fans, however, are for the large part used to this. It’s a phenomenon that occurs with great regularity; think once-to-thrice weekly. Ultimately, the ethical question is this: how much disservice are we willing to take with our monthly bill for our favorite MMORPG? Blizzard needs to make a non-intrusive method by which we can play WoW night or day, 24/7 if we want, and still have all the subtle benefits of a well-maintained game.
Update: Much to my chagrin, but not to my surprise, Blizzard has delayed the maintenance an additional two hours today. That makes the amount of game time lost to performance-tweaking maintainance (or whatever they do in the down-time) 8 hours, or 33% of today.
World of Warcraft Client Patch 1.11.0 w/ Download
The latest mandatory patch for WoW auto-updated for me today. Blizzard has done a great job with its tweaks and additions this time. Take, for example, the Rogue class. Before this patch, rogues had to activate their “detect traps” skill to detect traps, and even then it only lasted a few minutes! It truly is absurd to imagine a rogue who is incapable at times to detect traps! I scoff at the very notion! Now, however, detect traps has become a passive skill, just like in most D&D games.
Some of you are no doubt having trouble downloading this patch (WoW patch 1.11). If you can’t get it with Blizzard’s client, and you don’t want to have to pay FilePlanet a blanket subscription fee to obtain it, then you’ve come to the right place. Here at ElliottBack.com, we believe in the spirit of the law (or in this case, the spirit of the terms of service). We believe that this is a patch that you need to have, and that to charge you for it would be exploitation–pure and simple. We believe that we are doing both you and Blizzard a service by hosting this patch on our dedicated server and making it publically available for free download. Get it here, get it now, get it fast!
Also, the full changelog of this patch is viewable in this post.
Please note that connections are limited to 10 at a time, at which point each file should be able to download in less than two hours. The patch is 450mb.
