Big News Of The Week

We’re Getting Sam!

Blizzard Entertainment and Legendary Pictures announced this week that Sam Raimi has signed on to direct the motion picture based on Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft universe. Video game/comic book /movie geeks around the world buzzed like a honey farm, and are still buzzing. For the three of you who don’t know who Sam Raimi is:

• He is best known for directing cult horror films like the Evil Dead series and Drag Me To Hell as well as the blockbuster Spider-Man films.
• Raimi got a tiny cult following way back in 1981. That’s the year he directed and produced The Evil Dead, starring Bruce Campbell.
• Since then, Bruce Campbell has appeared in practically everything Raimi has ever made, including the Xena: Warrior Princess television series.
• According to the Blizzard press release, Raimi will be joined by producer Charles Roven, who spearheaded The Dark Knight, Batman Begins and the sci-fi classic 12 Monkeys. Roven will be joined by Alex Gartner, who will be joined by Legendary Pictures CEO Thomas Tull, Legendary’s Chief Creative Officer Jon Jashni, and Raimi’s producing partner Joshua Donen. Raimi’s other partner, Robert Tapert, will be an Executive Producer and Blizzard Entertainment’s Senior Vice President of Creative Development, Chris Metzen, a Co-Producer.
• Who are all these people?

Rumors And Scuttlebutt

WoWHead Premium

Almost everyone’s favorite WoW database website announced a pay service this week.  Here’s what Wowhead Premium gets you:

• No ads (also makes the pages wider for better viewing!
• No captcha (the little “enter the code in the box” thing)
• Custom forum avatars
• A free pass to the front of the Armory queue whenever you request Profiler resyncs
• Increased character limits for comments and forum posts
• A special Premium border for your forum avatar
• A special Premium badge for your user page
• Access to a special Premium e-mail address for input on site features and direction
• Premium access to ZAM.com, Allakhazam and WoWInterface and all the features found there

New Costume Contest Rules For Blizzcon

Blizzard CM Bashiok posted the following this week in the official forums:

“We’re in the process of updating the legal agreement from last year to also include the following rules for entry into the Costume Contest. These are not final. In addition to last year’s rules, costumes won’t:

• Exceed a 10′ dimension limit (no wider, deeper, taller than 10 feet)
• Include liquids or messy substances
• Be judged on items that are not worn or held

While we want people to be able to create and show off something as grandiose as the turtle mount from last year, and we’ll make every attempt to accommodate them to make sure they make it on stage, we want the judging and prizes to remain based on the essence of the contest – which is the costumes themselves.”

Shrinks In WoW?

According to an article in the Daily Mail Online, doctors treating children hooked on Internet fantasy games are logging on as players in a last ditch attempt to spend ‘face-to-face’ time with the addicted youngsters. The therapists are disguising themselves as wizards, warriors and dwarves on games like World of Warcraft, which some teens play for hours on end and has been branded as potent as crack cocaine. A leading London doctor is launching the online therapy. Medical staff will create their own ‘avatars’ in the online world in an effort to get to children who spend every available moment playing the games. Doctors fear so many of the gaming addicts have lost touch with the real world and that this is the only way to get to them.

Town Cryer

Briddge/Briand from Moonrunner writes: We have a tank in our guild who is firmly convinced that a Death Knight tank must still reach a Defense Rating of 689 in order to reach Crit Immunity even though he is using Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle. I and a few others have been trying to convince him that this is not so. He quotes sites that list Crit Immunity as being “Defense Skill 540(DR689)” and claims that this proves that, even though your Defense Skill might be 540 because of the Rune, you STILL need a Defense Rating of 689. I have used the results of be.imba.hu, shown him the script you can enter from the page on Defense at wowwiki.com as well as tried to present the argument from various angles, but nothing seems to convince him. I am hoping that you guys might be able to discuss this and I could point him to the podcast in question as further evidence, even if it is anecdotal.

Drop Of The Week

We Love You And Want You To Go To Blizzcon

We’ve been hearing for weeks from people who want to go to Blizzcon on August 21st and 22nd – that’s only three and a half weeks away – but people don’t have tickets and all of the listings for tickets on eBay are now scams, people. Don’t get robbed. So we decided to put together a listing with links out to sites where there are bonafide Blizzcon ticket giveaways going on, in the hopes that one of our listeners might win the tickets you so badly want. Those are:
-Alienware, who is only requiring your e-mail address, and contest closes July 31.
-nVidia, where you have to buy a qualifying video card and obtain a promotion code to enter. But if you’re already shopping for one of their cards…
-Razer, where you have to go on a virtual quest, but can also win some pretty cool Razer products.
-Kingston, where you have to fill out a simple form and answer the question “what Memory are you currently using in your computer?”

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, FigurePrints!, TypeFrag and Godaddy for sponsoring this episode.

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WoWArmory App In Itunes Store

Ever wanted to check your raid schedule, look up a piece of PvP gear, or concoct a new talent spec while on the go? The new World of Warcraft Mobile Armory app for iPhone and iPod touch lets you access the official Armory database from anywhere you have a mobile connection, and features much of the same functionality as the Armory website, including:

* Search for and view any character, item, guild, or Arena team in World of Warcraft.
* Seamlessly import your own character, guild, and Arena team profiles.
* Access your in-game calendar of events.
* View achievement-point leaderboards.
* Plan out talent specs using the fully functional talent calculator.

The World of Warcraft Mobile Armory is available now as a free download from the App Store on iPhone and iPod touch.

Druid and Warrior Q&A

They’re running out of classes to Q&A. This week, Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street submitted not one, but two class Q&A’s to the WoW Community team.

Rumors And Scuttlebutt

Ozzy Osbourne To Play Blizzcon?

We predicted it on this show just a month ago… well, actually, we just hoped aloud for it… but this rumor has nothing to do with us. From the shaky ground of Zakk Wylde failing to deny that Ozzy would be playing Blizzcon comes this outlandish rumor that started this week. It goes like this: Someone on Twitter posed Mr. Wylde the question of whether he would be playing guitar for Ozzy at Blizzcon. Wylde’s response was “this is news to me”. He didn’t say “no, I’m going to be in Belgium mid-August and Ozzy doesn’t like Anaheim.” He didn’t say “that’s impossible, I would know by now.” He just denied knowing. And so the rumor mill has been grinding this one all week. In fact, we got an e-mail from Celidur of Nazjatar, who wrote “I just wanted to tell you guys that I have a friend who up until recently worked for Blizzard, and he confirmed, saying, “barring unforeseen circumstances, he will be there.”"

Jay Mohr Confirmed, However

The star of CBS’s Gary Unmarried and now-perennial host of Blizzcon, Jay Mohr will be returning this year in some capacity or another. He got fairly good reviews as the host of the audience performance contests last year, so we expect more of the same there.

You Still Can’t Play World Of Warcraft In China

As recently as Wednesday, tech news sites were reporting that WoW is still down in China, where the operating license for Blizzard’s former partner there, The9, ended on June 7. That makes six weeks now that World Of Warcraft has not been locally playable in the largest country in the world. That is not, of course, stopping certain Chinese players from advertising ill-gotten gold on North American servers. According to Owen Fletcher from the IDG News service, “Many World of Warcraft players in mainland China have also migrated to Taiwan’s servers during the transition, even though that means a slower connection and having to start a new account.”

Town Cryer

Darlex from the Frustration guild on Mal’ganis writes: I’m a 450 miner and engineer,and a regular farmer in northrend, gathering all the ore and eternals I can find. Is there any farming mods besides gatherer that can help me acquire these materials?

Drop Of The Week

The Best Of The Best, Not Counting Eric Roberts

If you like watching other people play video games, then we have the event for you. Four of the highest-ranked World of Warcraft guilds worldwide will compete at the two Plantronics Battle of the Best @ GCO 2009, the first extraordinary and spectacular WoW summer event of the year 2009. On Saturday, August 1st, two of Germany’s finest WoW guilds will virtually clash against each other for the predominance of German World of Warcraft guilds: Irae AoD vs. For the Horde. Then On Sunday, August 2nd the audience will have the chance to witness the absolute World of Warcraft highlight of the Games Convention Online 2009 at Leipzig: Ensidia vs. Method, or the number one guild worldwide fighting against the number two ranked contender.

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, FigurePrints!, TypeFrag and Godaddy for sponsoring this episode.

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Big News Of The Week

Our First Look At Trial Of The Crusader

That’s the new 5-man dungeon for WoW coming in 3.2, and it was just made playable in the Public Test Realm yesterday. So what do we know so far?

Rumors And Scuttlebutt

They’re Buffing A Legendary

As of this week, Randydeluxe here is working on building a legendary weapon – Val’anyr, Hammer Of The Ancient Kings. That’s an orange text weapon, folks, with even better stats and unique looks than purple text epic weapons. We talk about what’s going down.

WoWTwitter In 3D
In case you missed it when they slid onto the scene, allow us to direct your attention to WoWTwitter, the service that allows you to Twitter as your WoW character. They advertise it as a way for “you to keep track of your in-game friends, events, and communicate with guild members.” Which is to say, just like regular Twitter, only without your mom asking you what it means that you’re LFG to do Chillmaw. If this just sounds like a bit too much social networking to you, at least go there for the giveaway!

Useless Stuff In WoW
If you missed us last week, the topic of lost improvements in WoW came up quite organically on our last show, and continued all week in our e-mail and guild chat. We’re took a few minutes to talk about parts of the game we all love that are unused, unnecessary or insufficient.

Town Cryer

Reznorhath, the Protection Warrior & Raid Leader from on Doomhammer EU writes: I’m part of a casual raiding which has been raiding 10-man Naxx since the beginning of the year. We’ve slowly worked our way through all the bosses and cleared it at the end of May. Along with farming 10-man Naxx, we’ve been PuGing 25-man Naxx, OS and VoA so most of our raiders are fully 200 lvl epic’d with a few pieces of lvl 213 gear. We’ve tried making progress into 10-man Ulduar (normal mode) and we are able to serve up the Flame Leviathan an extra large helping of floor, but can’t seem to progress through any of the other bosses. Are we jumping the gun with going straight to Ulduar after finishing Naxx?

Voltare from the Blackwing Lair writes: I was wondering what you think the ‘best’ class in terms of PvP is right now, if any, I guess.

Drop Of The Week

It’s Peggle Again

In a move designed to give us something to do when the Internet is down, PopCap and Blizzard published a stand-alone version of their World Of Warcraft edition of Peggle this week, and it’s not what you might guess. This is not just a copy of the WoW Addon version of Peggle that you can play when you’re not logged in. This is a completely new set of 10 levels in a full-screen game that is, quite frankly, better looking, better sounding and better playing than the WoW Addon edition of Peggle.

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, FigurePrints!, TypeFrag and Godaddy for sponsoring this episode.

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Big News Of The Week

Nothing Makes You Want To Play Horde Like Playing Alliance

Blizzard did nothing less than knock our socks off this week with the completely unanticipated announcement that they are working on a change to World Of Warcraft that would allow you to change the faction of your character, for a fee. One of our favorite Blizzard employees of all time, Danielle AKA Nathaera said, “We wanted to give everyone a very early heads-up that, in response to player requests, we’re developing a new service for World of Warcraft that will allow players to change their faction from Alliance to Horde or Horde to Alliance. There’s still much work to do and many details to iron out, but the basic idea is that players will be able to use the service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm. Players who ended up creating and leveling up characters on the opposite factions from their friends have been asking for this type of functionality for some time, and we’re pleased to be getting closer to being able to deliver it. “

WoW Engineers To Get A Mountain Of Changes

Blizzard poster Zarhym brought the pain this week with an epic statement about changes coming to everyone’s favorite crafting profession. We couldn’t possibly do it justice here, but we’ve got a link in our show notes to the full monty.

Rumors And Scuttlebutt

Warlocks Set To Make A Comeback

In their latest Q&A published to the World Of Warcraft official site and blog, Blizzard Lead Dev Greg Street talked about Warlocks, acknowledging their decline over the last couple of years, and pointed to changes coming for the dark caster class.

Noticing that he has now talked at great length about all-but-one of the caster DPS types in the game, Ghostcrawler also jumped into a community thread on the forums and did a less-formal Q&A about shadow priests.

2-person Arena Teams Are Back
Blizzard Community Manager Bornakk gave it up this week, saying in a post on the official forums, “After further consideration, and after hearing from many players, we are going to change how we approach the 2vs.2 arena bracket in Arena Season 7. We still think the 3vs.3 and 5vs.5 brackets will ultimately offer the best play experience, especially for very competitive gamers for whom game class balance issues are most noticeable. However, we recognize that many players just prefer to play in the vs. 2 bracket and will miss the chance to earn the current season’s gear. Therefore, we are going to still allow the 2vs.2 bracket to grant access to the current season of gear with three important exceptions: the current season’s weapons will not be available for purchase, the current season’s shoulder armor will not be available for purchase, and players will not qualify for the Gladiator title/rewards unless you earn the appropriate rating in the 3vs.3 or 5vs.5 bracket. We look forward to the changes in the next major content patch and hope to have a great next Arena Season.”

Cataclysm?
According to several sources who apparently spend a lot of time looking for this kind of stuff, Blizzard locked down the name “Cataclysm” this week as a registered trademark, and probably obtained the domain name “wowcataclysm.com”, among others. This led to all manner of speculation on what they could be doing with that word.

Town Cryer

Munhel from the Kael’Thas realm writes:
I’ve been playing WoW for some time but just recently started raiding seriously and I’m encountering a gear choice conundrum. I have a few iLevel 213 pieces and I’ll most likely have the chance to roll on some tier tokens in the near future. The problem comes from the fact that  some of the 213 stuff I’m already wearing seems comparable or better to the tier gear and of course it’s in tier gear slots (chest, legs, etc…). Do you guys always choose tier over drop for the additional tier bonuses? Do you take the tier tokens but not equip the gear until you’ve gotten enough for a bonus?

Drop Of The Week

Just One Skin Ain’t Enough!
The best documentary on gamers like you…  that you’ve never seen – Second Skin is finally getting released in select theaters and on DVD in August.

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, FigurePrints!, TypeFrag and Godaddy for sponsoring this episode.

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