We start off this week talking about our first personal forays into Firelands, and what came of that little experiment.
Big News of the Week
Blizzard responds to Swifty ban incident. As you might have heard, Razer WoW gamer Swifty, along with numerous other players, were banned due to server disruption violations during one of Swifty’s live streams that crashed a server. While Swifty acknowledged that he never intended to crash the server, Bashiok responded to the bans by stating that even if no one intended to crash servers or disrupt gameplay, the emote spamming and influx of players brought down many servers. We’re dedicated to providing a fun, stable, reliable gameplay environment for our players.
World of Warcraft coming to Brazil in 2011. At an exclusive press event at the Museu da Casa Brasileira in São Paulotoday, Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced that a fully localized Brazilian Portuguese version of its critically acclaimed massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft®, will be released in Brazil later this year. Brazilian Portuguese will be the ninth officially supported language for World of Warcraft worldwide, and the third supported language in Latin America, complementing the existing English and Spanish versions. An official Brazilian Portuguese World of Warcraft community website will also be available at launch. In addition, players in Brazil will have access to customer service for the game in Brazilian Portuguese.
World of Warcraft Mobile Armory for Android™ Now Available.
Rumors & Scuttlebut
New Battlegrounds…it’s complicated. We’d like to. We certainly haven’t forgotten about the PvP community at all and we do a lot of PvP oriented behind the scenes work right now. While not very much of that effort is channeled into creating new maps at the moment, we would definitely like to increase the variety of Battleground and Arena maps that are available in the future. That’s where things get sticky, though. One might think that creating a Battleground is a pretty simple process (they look simple, right?), but it’s not.
Part of the reason is that Battlegrounds are like ducks. A duck looks like it effortlessly glides across the water, but their little feet are actually working madly beneath the surface to make it happen. Battlegrounds are the same way. They may look simple — even static — to a casual observer, but in reality there’s an incredible number of very complicated processes going on behind the scenes. Part of the reason for this is due to a lot of technical hurdles that need to be jumped to make them perform as seamlessly as they do, battle after battle. As a result, it’s actually extremely difficult to design Battlegrounds, partially due to the technical limitations that are currently in place.
WoWArmory Facebook Application Closing. So there’s that.
Drop of the Week
Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects: Written by New York Times bestselling author Christie Golden, the new novel Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects follows the former War Chief of the Horde as he struggles with the ongoing repercussions of the Cataclysm.
When Azeroth was young, the noble titans appointed the five great dragonflights to safeguard the budding world. Each of the flights’ leaders was imbued with a portion of the titans’ vast cosmic powers. Together, these majestic Dragon Aspects committed themselves to thwarting any force that threatened the safety of the World of Warcraft.
Over ten thousand years ago, a betrayal by the maddened black Dragon Aspect, Deathwing, shattered the strength and unity of the dragonflights. His most recent assault on Azeroth—the Cataclysm—has left the world in turmoil. At the Maelstrom, the center of Azeroth’s instability, former Horde warchief Thrall and other accomplished shaman struggle to keep the world from tearing apart in the wake of Deathwing’s attack. Yet a battle also rages within Thrall regarding his new life in the shamanic Earthen Ring, hampering his normally unparalleled abilities.
Unable to focus on his duties, Thrall undertakes a seemingly menial task from an unexpected source: the mysterious green Dragon Aspect, Ysera. This humble endeavor soon becomes a journey spanning the lands of Azeroth and the timeways of history itself, bringing Thrall into contact with ancient dragonflights. Divided by conflict and mistrust, these dragons have become easy prey to a horrific new weapon unleashed by Deathwing’s servants . . . a living nightmare engineered to exterminate Azeroth’s winged guardians.
Of even greater concern is a bleak and terrifying possible future glimpsed by Ysera: the Hour of Twilight. Before this apocalyptic vision comes to pass, Thrall must purge his own doubts in order to discover his purpose in the world and aid Azeroth’s dragonflights as they face the Twilight of the Aspects.
Special thanks to our sponsors this week: Squarespace (use code WOW6), Audible.com, Doghouse Systems, and Typefrag.com.
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/sigh – trying to make it through my usual weekly listening of your podcast which I typically love. But the whole commentary on the “swifty incident” is borderline painful – he crashed three servers, I’m not sure why yourselves and other places I’ve seen online tend to forget that. One server crash is an accident, three is purposeful. It was his event, he was in charge of it, instead of canceling the event he moved it from server to server knowing full well what the result would be. His followers also held an entire server hostage till Blizzard undid the ban. His “event” had nothing to do with an ingame activity, it had to do with his job for Razer.
Hey, I’m totally from the Bay Area as well.
San Diego is definitely better than LA, it’s like a sunnier San Francisco.
Listening to this and wanted to comment on the ban of a player having fun. You mention doing funeral processions and putting blizzard in a bad position. Blizzard put themselves in that position when they game this game RP servers. If they are gonna ban people for being in places doing something together, they will continue to get bad press and it destroys the purpose of the game.
Now what Blizzard should do is what Eve online does. Eve requires a form for large battles so they can allocate resources in order to not have the game die in those areas.
Selynnberly, Feathermoon
Hey, i think Swifty should be banned for 3 days he shut down 3 servers and that IS wrong, i know he didnt mean it but if he does something like that he should be punished somehow….
Galannie – mok’nathel
The android armory app has had auction access for months. The update it received added the items list and that’s about it.
I wanted to say thank you. You guys take time every week to prepare a great podcast. I’ve donated and listened for several years and just coming back to WoW again after a break it’s great to see your still around. I love this podcast. It’s by far the best WoW podcast on the web.
Thank you Scott & company – your all great
@Tara – You’re not wrong about the impact. But without really knowing his intentions, all I can do is take the guys word for it. Not sure why you are so certain his motives were nefarious? If you have other info, do tell…happy to report on the show.
Pingback: Weekly Podcast Roundup: July 18-24, 2011 | gQuit's WoWPress
Sorry Scott, but I have to agree with Tara regarding the commentary about the “Swifty incident” in the last show. I don’t think Swifty’s intentions were bad. He and his guild were holding a contest to give away Razer products. However, the situation that followed wasn’t handled very well. For instance, after the first server was crashed, why did they move the contest onto a second server, crash it, and then go on again and crash yet another server? Why didn’t they cancel the event after the first crash? I watched the livestream feed the day after and there didn’t seem much concern about what was happening to other players on the server. Not surprisingly, a day later the video was locked as private. Also, once the ban was announced, his followers held the Darkspear server hostage, crashing it throughout the day until the ban was reversed. No where could I find any sort of statement from Razer or Swifty apologizing for all the inconvenience this incident caused people. Blizzard was made to look bad because despite their best intentions to weed out the malicious from the non-malicious, it created the perception of two sets of rules depending upon who you are.
Holding in-game guild events on your own server is one thing and I think such events are a good thing, but I don’t think Blizzard partners such as Razer should be allowed to hold contests like this because of the potential for problems for players on the servers involved.
Isn’t it kind of a contradiction for Dills to be saying that he thought the FL content had been beaten too quickly by high end guilds in one episode, then saying that it had only been beaten by a few guilds and therefore the pace didn’t matter in the next?
@Tom: it also added the talent calculator and calendar, but the main thing I DO want to see them add is the 3D character view that the iOS stuff has so I can get a decent picture of my toon for my phone wallpaper.
Also I checked out those J!NX promo codes and none of them seem to be working.
So, this is the episode where you started marketing drugs to kids.
Aren’t you a bit ashamed? Didn’t your conscience tell you something was wrong with that spot? Seriously, do you think that kids should be popping caffine pills “along with an energy drink” in order to play longer and “avoid bathroom breaks”?
I understand the need for sponsors. Sponsors like Squarespace, Typefrag, Doghouse, Audible. But pills marketed to kids?
I’m a long time listener and pretty disappointed with this moral lapse on your part.
Anyone know where I can buy the music they played in the break of this episode?
Anyone know of the name of the song played during the break at 50:01 or so?
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