Tagged News: community

Verne Troyer is (yep, you guessed it!) a Gnome Mage in this new TV ad for WoW. Troyer's spot joins the previously released William Shatner and Mr. T commercials.

Verne Troyer - Master of the Arcane

Today we introduce a new column to our schedule. Every other Wednesday, Sean Bulger will check in with his look at communities and design. In the first edition, Sean introduces us to his column and talks about players as a resource for development.

While it certainly does come off a bit grim to refer to players as a resource, we are. In fact, we are probably the most important resource for an MMO. When a game begins to fail and starts to lose players it tends to cause a landslide - when enough people leave a guild, they often take other guild members with them. When enough players leave a server, server merges are needed. Many people play MMOs because they are filled with other players - even testimonies from primarily solo-gamers still mention that other players filling the world is a positive thing for them. It is what separates these games from single player, or normal multiplayer games.

Read more after the click.

Associate Producder, Josh Drescher, gave out a freebie today on his blog update.

Everyone's hard at work putting the final touches on the new and improved WAR Beta. With the end in sight, excitement is running very high here at EA Mythic HQ. Thanks to all the patient testers who stayed active in discussions during the downtime. Your feedback has been a critical part of this latest round of changes and improvements.

I'll see you on the battlefield shortly.

A final freebie:

There are no "Blood Priests" in WAR.

To read more of Josh's blog, check it out here.

EA Mythic has recently announced that Robert Mull is now the Community Relations Director. He now oversees Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, and Warhammer Online.

Greetings All,

I'm Robert Mull, the new Community Relations Director for EA Mythic. I oversee the work our team of Community Coordinators do for Warhammer Online (James Nichols), Dark Age of Camelot (Missy Hatch and Joanne Laroche) and Ultima Online (Jeremy Dalberg). They are a great team and I am lucky to have inherited them.

As a gamer who got his start in MMOs with the Ultima Online beta, being allowed to support the same community that made that game so enjoyable to me is a real pleasure and I feel like I have come full circle. Since then a decade has passed and I have played countless MMOs. A few of these became part of my daily routine for years as I worked to found guilds, build cities, run player-events, engage in pvp conflicts, roleplay, and be an active member of the gaming community. While the games have changed over the years, the real draw for me has always been the people. A strong well-supported community makes good games great.

Click "Read More" to see the rest of the announcement.

Please be aware that key loggers have been added to a massive amounts of AddOn packages on several different AddOn sites.

In general we recommend not downloading any AddOn packages that have executables or batch files that run installers or data collectors, as they may have been tampered with.

Cairenn has posted an excellent description of the problem and how to resolve it if you've already installed an infected package:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=3168484081&sid=1

In addition, WoWInterface.com has taken the step of quarantining any package that has an executable installer. This was a bold move to ensure the safety of the community and is greatly appreciated.

The fine folks at Kotaku have stumbled upon two new WoW TV ads which feature none other than Mr. T and William Shatner. The ads seem to mimic the minimalist style that seems popular today, with sparse backgrounds and subtle (well, as subtle as Mr. T can be) humor. They maintain the pop-culture referential humor that Blizzard demonstrated with their first big WoW TV ad, which was a take on the movie Office Space.

All I have to say is...I pity the foo who pulls aggro!

In keeping with their insane ability to tear through content, the first Illidan kill by the Chinese guild The Seven was recently reported on the WoW forums.

While we've seen quite our share of Illidan kills on this side of the world so you may be asking "so what?"

Burning Crusade came out on September 7th in China, meaning it took only 51/52 days for The Seven to level to 70, gear up, and kill Illidan. From the screenshot you can see that many members are still sporting their tier 3, which speaks volumes for how powerful it actually is.

Naysayers may say that due to the various bugfixes and changes that went live prior to China even receiving the expansion they had access to a much better tuned Outlands than we did, but you can't deny how impressive this is, even if they had a little bit of an easier time of it than we did.

Barely a day after going live, Zul'Aman has been conquered and Zul'jin defeated. EU guilds Curse and Death Wish were the first to report kills, but by this point nearly the entire loot tables or each boss have been reported to World of Raids.

From what we've seen so far, the loot is between Karazhan and SSC / TK in terms of quality, at item level 132. In addition to a single epic, each boss is reported to drop 2 Badges of Justice, with Zul'jin dropping 3. These can be redeemed for a new sets of gear that supports nearly every spec at costs of around 50-80 badges.

It seems that the encounters aren't especially difficult, but most guilds that have attempted it seem to be geared out in t5-t6, so we'll most likely have to wait until it goes live before reports of Karazhan geared raids come in.

Last week almost all of SOE's services were shut down for an extended downtime period - that is, for 14 hours. This was not an unexpected downtime, although while SOE tried to inform people as best they could, there were still a number of gamers who were left confused by this. SOE has now released some information to help clear up some questions about the downtime.

This last Tuesday, Sony Online Entertainment brought all of its games and services down for approximately 14 hours. While we did everything we could to make people aware of the pending downtime as early as possible, some SOE gamers have expressed confusion about what exactly we did that day.

You can view the full article by clicking 'read more' below.

On the current 2.2.2 PTRs both the new Brewfest and Hallow's End events are up. While we've experienced the joys of transforming wands and gnome masks in the past, there's a twist this year as Neth informs us...

Hallow's End New Holiday World Event: The Headless Horseman has been seen terrorizing local villages.

Drops courtesy of a level 16 troll named Kensalu!

Me wants.

Since then the location of the Headless Horseman has been discovered on the PTRs and reported on by Squeakytweaky in his post. Apparently he's summoned through a daily quest in the Graveyard wing of Scarlet Monestary. He's a level 70 elite boss that, according to a strategy provided by Katinie is a multiple phase fight that requires quite a bit of attention. His loot table seems to include multiple epic rings (melee DPS, healing, and caster DPS) and a rather fearsome looking epic plate helmet. Alongside these drops there are two single use broom mounts, a blue version that functions like a land mount and an epic one that allows you to fly. So far both only have one charge, but the day is not yet through, perhaps a unlimited use rare drop exists? If only...