Posts tagged wow

Here at WoW.com, we’re on a Daily Quest (which we try to do every day, honest) to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

While we’re all skulking about waiting for our servers to come up — or skulking about on Shadow Council waiting for tonight’s RP event — it seems as good a time as any to talk about pretending to be people we aren’t in places we aren’t. (Secret: I’m not actually a troll shaman. But do keep it quiet.)

• Some oldies but goodies from Too Many Annas, covering being left out of RP and the many places RP can go.
• The Lazy Sniper talks about choosing names for characters.
• It may not be WoW-centric, but the latest issue of The Escapist is all about roleplaying.

One of the more interesting facets of playing a game as extensive as World of Warcraft are the legends and mysteries surrounding the game, both inside and out. A lot of these legends, mysteries and unsolved puzzles have developed over time into urban legends — stories that sound just true enough to be plausible, but usually end up being untrue, dead ends or simply unsolved mysteries that were never meant to be puzzled out. Today we’ll be talking about a weapon whose origins were so mysterious and carried so many loose ends that it left players in a tizzy for years: Ashbringer.

The legend of Ashbringer started when World of Warcraft was originally released. The orange legendary weapon was discovered in the game files by data miners, and the stats and proc on the weapon were truly amazing. At the time, even epic weapons were extremely rare, so seeing something with an orange tag on it was more than a little unique and awe-inspiring. However, other than the datamined weapon, there was no indication of it appearing in game — that is, until players slowly leveled from launch to their first steps into the Plaguelands.

Continue reading The Urban Legends of Warcraft: Ashbringer

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From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We’re giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame.

The popular saying about leading a raiding guild is that it’s somewhat like herding cats with a feather. Imagine then, if you will, tickling players through day-to-day game life amidst the friction of potentially volatile in-character roleplaying. Arialynn, the GM of <Templars of the Rose> on Earthen Ring (US-RP), leads an established troupe of roleplayers that’s spent the Wrath era not besieging Arthas but running medieval-style market days in Dustwallow Marsh. Headquartered in Theramore Harbor, the Templars most assuredly exemplify the road less traveled, both literally and figuratively.

What’s it like to lead a guild that spends more time tossing back stiff ones in the inn than it does wrestling with Defile before the Frozen Throne?

Continue reading 15 Minutes of Fame: Herding roleplayers with a feather

Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration will show you how, brought to you by Joe Perez, otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and the For The Lore podcast Cataclysm beta is still a hot topic around the internet. Everyone keeps refreshing their Battle.net pages hoping that they will see the wonderful dragon artwork of Deathwing staring at them. Others who have made it in have been filtering information back to the outside world and trying to keep everyone up to date. The biggest news of course being the new beta build which implemented the new 31-point talent trees.

Players have not been the only source of information over the last few weeks. There was a Blizzard developer chat on Twitter last week. If you missed it, don’t panic! We have the entire thing organized for you by category right here. There was some very useful information handed out … and some rather silly ones, but overall it was a good dev chat. This week I thought I would take some time to look over what we learned from the developer chat as well as talk about how things look now for More >

Yesterday, Curse.com announced the acquisition of MMO-Champion from its owners, Major League Gaming. Boubouille, the big dog over at MMO-Champion, is heading to the Curse team as well. This is some pretty exciting news for the Curse network!

Curse, which already has one of the largest repositories of WoW addons and mods for download, as well as the venerable World of Raids outlet, adds on significant prowess in the WoW information community. With content from all three channeled into each other, you can expect big things from all involved. Read the official press release over at Curse or MMO-Champion.

Some of the questions that I personally had about the acquisition were, happily and thankfully, answered by both World of Raids and Boubouille himself. Curse currently has a premium subscription-based service, and I wanted to know if we could expect something similar from MMO-Champion in the future. Boubouille answered on his website:

I’m not going to bullshit you, premium might happen but it’s really not a top priority for the moment. I would hardly call it premium, more like “Donator/Sponsor” for people who would like to help, I would also like to explore new features through that like user generated blogs or user groups More >