Big News Of The Week
The Global Crackdown on WoW
Wherein we travel around the world talking about the strange political developments afoot, with regard to WoW. Have some links!
First it was China.
Then, China.
Then Germany.
And again in Germany.
And really, we shouldn’t forget Sweden.
Where is this all going? We wonder.
Rumors And Scuttlebutt
Big Addon Rules Change
As we prepped to record the show, Blizzard poster “Frost” just released what seems like, well, a response to our last two episodes. We’re not saying that’s what it is, it’s just a coincidence, but regardless, we discussed the profit viability of mods these last two episodes of The Instance, and just now, Blizzard has said the following: “We’ve been continually impressed by the creativity and expertise on display among World of Warcraft user interface add-ons, and have formalized design and distribution guidelines for them to help ensure their integrity, safety, and quality for the community. Please visit the new guidelines page for more information.” And what does that guidelines page say? It says that you can’t charge any money for any aspect of a mod, period.
Why Are We Suddenly So Thirsty?
In the near future, you’ll be able to see World of Warcraft characters in a new place — the beverage aisle. This summer, Mountain Dew will launch Game Fuel in two World of Warcraft-inspired flavors — Alliance Blue (wild fruit flavor) and Horde Red (citrus cherry flavor) — available for a limited time only. We’ll be announcing further details in the coming months, so stay tuned.
Town Cryer
Jim Bob writes:
I play a UD death knight tank on the Maiev surver. I’ve seen one of my friends automatically mark his targets with skulls as he attacked them when he tanked. Unfortunately he quit wow before I got a chance to ask him. I was wondering if you knew more about.
Jim Bob, we like Adam’s Mark. You can find it here.
Drop Of The Week
The iPhone Is Finally Worth Having
That’s right, Blizzard is going for the ultimate synergy of WoW security and iPhone functionality – the Authenticator is now an app. For your iPhone. And there was great rejoicing.
Currently, the new application is available in Korean only, but the site says US/EU coming soon.
And we give away five t-shirts, courtesy of Jinx! Congratulations to our winners!
Additional show content provided by Mean Gene, Patrick from France, Darrell the Tipgiver, Steve “Buxley” Pietrowicz and the outstanding Instance Community.
Special thanks to DogHouse Systems, TypeFrag and Godaddy for sponsoring this episode.
The segment about mages was great. I’ve never played a mage and its nice to know more about the classes. Having an experienced mage player on made the segment even better. I think you guys should do that more often!
Great show, again.
Wish I could have heard it live but really wanted to comment on the Mages in raids comment…
Won’t duel spec fix this? Won’t mages just run frost in pvp and switch (without gear changes) when they run raids?
I believe the new mod policy states that you may not solicit donations IN GAME. You CAN solicit off game, like on the download website.
Hello Kitty is Japanese, not Chinese.
Nevertheless, good show.
Great show this week guys as always. This was the first show that I got to see live and I really enjoyed it. For all of my fellow listeners that haven’t tuned in for a live show yet: I highly recommend you check it out.
You mentioned that China may have the most WoW players, but I think it is Europe. Just type in Armory in Google and the number 1 result is the EU Version of the armory. The US one doesn’t even return on the first page.
hey, where’s the MP3? can’t seem to download it from itunes or from the website? must be a podcast server problem? 9:12am ET 3/24/2009
Thanks,
-intutor
Guys I listened to last week’s podcast and bit my tongue, or in this case fingers, but after the mage segment this week I have to chime in. No offense meant to the people who are complaining about the mage needing to be fixed but they don’t know how to play their class. I am arcane spec. Cortanas on area 52. I am linking my meters from nax last week. No one is close to me on dps in boss fights. I am geared out yes, but I know my class and enjoy playing it. If they do something to buff us up, I have such an issue on agro right now it will be nightmare. All I hear in raids is nerf mages, they are way to powerful, I sometimes get passed in trash but rarely. I put out 18k dps on a double mob pull before four horsemen last week. Mage are more than fine, learn your class and stop complaining people. I would be glad to talk about this further. http://wowwebstats.com/14yyxwp5kcx53?m&s=bosses
“You mentioned that China may have the most WoW players, but I think it is Europe. Just type in Armory in Google and the number 1 result is the EU Version of the armory. The US one doesn’t even return on the first page.” – gcowhsu
Currently, there are a bit more than 4.1million active North American characters (above level 10) and a bit more than 2.7million active EU characters (above level 10).
When you search the term “armory” in Google, the EU WoW Armory is returned first and the US WoW Armory second. The tiny difference in rank is probably due to the EU WoW Armory index page being smaller in size.
As we said in The Instance, we don’t have a way to gauge how many Chinese are playing.
I liked the voice effect at the start. It reminded me of the Wraith from Stargate Atlantis.
Did you see that a couple of addon makers are not going to upgrade their addons anymore because of the change to the policy? (or the addition of ANY policy) Outfitter is one and QuestHelper is another…
I had a suggestion that might help you mac user. Using Ventrilo is great, but if he wanted to use the in-game voice chat with his new head set, he will need to activate it from the system prefs.
Just go to Apple > System Preferences…
Then click on Sound under Hardware.
Select the Input tab.
Here you will see all your audio input devices and allows you to adjust your input level. All you need to do is select the desired input and that should get it working with any apps that support sound input. Hope that helps~
On mages, might it just be possible to have two raid DPS specs and a PVP spec, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me… you dont have to be ableboth in every spec, if you think frost is fun mabe you should PVP more and get some practice PVPing. For the record I do have a mage and I don’t pvp to all that often.