World of Warcraft: An Experiment Begins

It is no secret that managing Garrisons can get a tad boring, especially if you're like me and manage multiple as a result of crippling altoholism. While the rewards are great, the type of engagement expected on a daily basis makes for a poor experience that results in players getting burned out or fatigued and unable to do much more beyond logging in to manage. This is something I intend to criticize in the near future, along with a number of other aspects of World of Warcraft in the wake of the Q1 sub drop and the reactions to it (there's way too many to link).

Prior to this unsettling announcement, I devised a simple plan to try to spice up my Garrison management, which I set up for by depositing all of my gold on every active character into the guild bank. The plan was to determine how much gold I could make in 30 days (or about a month), mostly to find out how many WoW Tokens I could buy every month. The experiment would entail the following:

• No depositing money into the Guild Bank (this is something I do habitually to protect my wealth a little better).
• I can withdraw money from the Guild Bank to cover purchases such as Garrison upgrades, Heirlooms, and WoW Tokens but cannot withdraw gold to inflate the amount of money I make (in other words, I must withdraw exact amounts of gold).
• Also, I'm using Guild Bank funds to repair gear.
• This should also mean I don't sell anything from the Guild Bank unless for some reason I run out of stuff to sell (this should not happen).
• I will screenshot Altoholic showing how much money I have on my characters either at the end of the day or the beginning of the next day before doing anything that might make money. Also, I cannot send money between characters.
• Since one of my active characters is on the other merged realm, I'm mailing gold from that character to my Warrior on the realm shown in the Altoholic window. This serves as an exception to the rule.
• While anything technically goes in terms of money making, it's ideal to try to make money as "naturally" as possible. This means that most of the money I make it from activities I would normally find myself doing (Garrison management, dailies, selling items on the Auction House, etc).
• The amount of times I can perform said activities may be changed due to external circumstances (including this experiment).
• I will provide regular updates through tweets (at the moment it'll be weekly, not including the tweet with this article), with a final tally at the end of the experiment.
• There will be an Imgur album available that'll be updated more regularly.

So far, it's working pretty well and I find myself logging on multiple times to check up on my missions when previously I did it on a daily basis. I also find myself participating a little more in activities such as dailies and plan to do some LFR soon as well.

If anyone else is interested in doing this experiment or a similar one, feel free to join in (it's not like I can stop you after all).

World of Warcraft: Finished A Cloak in 6.0 - My Thoughts

Following up on my previous "rant" video and article regarding Blizzard's announcement of the removal of the cloak quest, upon the release of patch 6.0.2, I began to work my way through the legendary quest chain to try to get a fourth legendary cloak. While I was successful (I started from right after A Test of Valor since the quest was removed), I was exceptionally lucky and also had to utilize what I'm assuming is a band-aid fix that Blizzard put in, allowing players to farm Siege of Orgrimmar on Normal (or higher) to get additional attempts to earn items required to finish the legendary quests (though players could still only loot one item per boss), meaning that while the Gaze of the Black Prince buff was removed, the cloak can comfortably be finished in the 4-5 weeks left before Warlords of Draenor (particularly if one was stuck on the Test of Valor step which is a mandatory three weeks of delay). Here is my video of the followup:
Whether the cloak was easy to earn or that players essentially had a couple years to work on it is irrelevant in the face of the somewhat short-notice announcement followed by contradictory changes as to whether Blizzard wanted players finishing their cloaks or not. While I am still upset (and confused) as to how the removal of the legendary cloak quest was handled, I'm glad that Blizzard did give players the capability of finishing the cloak with the change they added to Siege of Orgrimmar's looting system. Considering there has been advance announcement of the legendary ring quest line being exclusive to Warlords of Draenor, players will be less likely to scramble to finish it in that particular case.

On an unrelated note - Happy Veterans/Armistice Day.

World of Warcraft: A Rant About the Dislike of "Pandaland"

When Mists of Pandaria was initially copyrighted by Blizzard, people thought it was an intentional gag meant to throw off players from discovering the true expansion to come after Cataclysm. However, when it was made apparent through the trailer that Mists of Pandaria was a real, flesh-out expansion, there was a good amount of negative reaction to it.  While there are valid reasons to dislike Mists of Pandaria, the reaction came off as judging a book by its cover, (much like the movie Kung Fu Panda, which it was compared to even though the movie largely received positive reviews) since criticism was made before most players could try out the content the expansion had to offer, thus making the criticism fueled mostly by irrational reasoning. This line of commenting continues to this day and upon reading a certain one on Reddit, I thought it might be worth doing a rant on the topic with my thoughts on it:

I only wish I'd been a little clearer in my rant than I was in the paragraph above. As for the title of this article, I deliberately used the name "Pandaland" since it's one of the derogatory names associated with players that offered the "criticism" of Mists of Pandaria as mentioned above, meaning that hopefully this rant and statements associated with it will reach the right people as opposed to being the equivalent of preaching before the choir.

World of Warcraft: Legendary Cloak Quest Rant

Today, I saw an announcement by Blizzard to remove the legendary cloak quest line that has spanned all of Mists of Pandaria's content. When I saw the announcement and, more importantly, the reactions to the announcement, I wanted to express my own thoughts on the announcement in the form of a brief article. Instead, I have opted to try a new format I have been considering for a while. After finishing my League of Legends stream today, I created a short rant video, which you can watch below:
As I say in the video, my rant is a little repetitive but I hope it gets the point across that I don't like what Blizzard is trying to do, particularly since it came so suddenly and it removes a lore-rich questline from the game with little reason.

World of Warcraft: An Incredibly Crazy Encounter Concept

While I don't really care to keep track that much nowadays, apparently I hit 80000 posts on a forum I frequent. Over the last few months I've been working on an encounter concept and never really got around to posting it anywhere. Thus, given the approaching milestone, I thought I might as well share it. I may end up posting encounters concepts on this blog as well, but this one is just too long, so here's a link instead.

Cheers. More articles to come soon.

WoW Short: A Word on Valor Rewards

As of the release of Mists of Pandaria, Valor rewards got revamped a bit. Initially, the rewards were too low and were hotfixed quickly to have many of the activities that rewarded Valor Points increased to double. The rewards are as follows:

• Finishing a Looking For Raid group awards 90 Valor Points if it's the first time in the week doing that specific section and half that amount for subsequent runs of that section.
• Finishing a Random Heroic Dungeon awards 80 Valor Points if it's the first time in a given day and half that amount for subsequent runs in the same day.
• Finishing a Random Scenario awards 40 Valor Points if it's the first time in a given day and half that amount for subsequent runs in the same day.
• A majority of the Pandaria dailies award 5 Valor Points. This may seem like a very small amount but it adds up quick.

These rewards aren't too bad and the general values of the Valor rewards aren't actually what bothers me. What bothers me is the fact that prior to Mists of Pandaria, there was a slightly modified Valor Point reward system for Random Heroic Dungeons, which "improved" on an even more ancient system that had been around for an age, but was brought back for Mists of Pandaria.

This "previous" system awarded Valor Points (or equivalent currency) for completing Random Heroics on the first run of the day, while awarding lesser rewards for subsequent runs. However, the system that was around prior to Mists of Pandaria instead gave the same bonus reward for the first seven runs in a given week.

Thus, I'm curious why in Mists of Pandaria Blizzard decided to essentially "revert" back to the old system of granting the most Valor for daily runs. I know that the current design is something of a compromise between the two systems, but it seems rather punishing and time-consuming to reach the 1000 Valor Point weekly cap if you happen to miss a day or are unable to play every single day.

The suggestion for changing this is simple: go back to the first seven runs per week system that was around prior to Mists of Pandaria (for both Random Heroics and Scenarios) in terms of awarding larger amounts of Valor Points. I feel there is nothing compelling, interesting, or difficult about punishing players with diminishing Valor Point rewards for missing a day, thus causing them to use more of their time to reach Valor Point cap. (If anyone thinks different, feel free to say why.)

World of Warcraft Short: The Last Few Days (For Me) In A Nutshell

The last few days have been quite an experience for the World of Warcraft community at large, myself included. With Mists of Pandaria, a massive amount of new content became available, some of which has already been consumed by the most voracious, hardcore players of the community (not intended to sound offensive in any way), but some have yet to be accessed or completed. I personally think I accomplished much and I will list some of these accomplishments below. How many have you already completed?

• Leveled one (or more) characters to 90.
• Experienced the Direbrew event at level 90.
• Discovered all the reputations in Pandaria (for your faction).
• Reached Exalted with the Lorewalkers.
• Defeated over 150 Mists of Pandaria rare spawns and Finished up more than 75% of the Glorious! achievement.
• Obtained at least 5 of the special drops from rare spawns (see this guide)
• Became a Pet Battler, unlocking all three pet slots.
• Leveled one (or more) pets to 10.
• Completed all the level 90 scenarios (including the level 90 version of Theramore's Fall).
• Unlocked and complete enough dailies to get this achievement.
• Obtained some Elder Charms of Good Fortune (usable on world boss encounters).
• Finished the Pandaren starting zone.
• Defeated Galleon, the world boss in Valley of the Four Winds (Also known as Salyi's Warband) and the Sha of Anger, the world boss in Kun-lai Summit.

As you can probably tell, I'm still busy experiencing what Pandaria has to offer (aside from other special events occurring as of today), so I might not release as many articles over the next few weeks. However, I do have one in particular planned in the near future.
Happy birthday to me, lol.

World of Warcraft: New Recruit-A-Friend Mount!

A few months ago, Blizzard announced that a new mount for the Recruit-A-Friend system, which allows players to bring their friends into the game with the benefit of acquiring bonuses such as summoning each other anywhere, having experience gain bonuses, and an exclusive mount for the recruiter, which has only changed once in the past (from the Swift Zhevra to the X-53 Touring Rocket). As of this Tuesday, this new mount will replace the X-53 Touring Rocket and it will look familiar, as it uses a similar model as the Winged Guardian mount. May I present the Heart of the Nightwing:

Thanks to these people for letting me get a screenshot of them. Yes, there are two people.

This is a mount similar to Vial of the Sands in that it turns the player into the mount and another player can "mount" the player, effectively making it a two-person mount like its Touring Rocket predecessor. With that said, it's probably going to be here for a long time and it looks pretty nice (and somewhat similar to some Mists of Pandaria mounts).

Because of this new mount, however, I would also like to ask that if anyone is interested in being recruited as part of the Recruit-A-Friend program, they add a comment below. I'm willing to help out with your leveling process as much as I can as I have a huge stockpile and (at the moment) time to do so. I only need one such person as the mount is likely to become account-wide like many other mounts in Mists of Pandaria though I guess it doesn't hurt to have more recruits (but I like allowing others to have the opportunity to have the mount too).

If anyone really is interested, we can work out details in the comments as well. You can also check the Recruit-A-Friend thread on Wowhead to find other recruiters.

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Beta - Looks Like I'm Leaving The Laptop On Overnight...

So lately I've been playing a lot more World of Warcraft now that the Diablo 3 hype is over. With it, I've also decided to do a little more beta (though I'm not quite level 90 yet), but since any information I would report would be weeks old, I've abstained from making articles on beta in favor of other articles. However, I decided to mess around on the beta today and was met with this:

This is a PATCH - I am not reinstalling the beta client.

Yes. You're looking at something of a 20 GB patch that's just been put onto the beta. I thought maybe Blizzard was just joking around, but they're being absolutely serious. Aside from some features they're implementing or enabling on the beta tonight, such as Pet Battles, I have a hypothesis on what this patch might bring. I personally think that aside from implementing a lot of new beta content, the game engine itself may have been updated, hence why the patch is the size of the game file's current size (more or less) at the current time. However, do not quote me on this as it is a complete guess.

With that, I wish all of you beta testers luck getting this patch applied. You may want to leave your computer on overnight since it's essentially the same thing as installing World ofWarcraft all over again...(but at least the download is pretty fast for me).

Update: According to MMO-Champion, the beta is now at 5.0.3 from 5.0.1, but that still doesn't seem to explain why the entire client needs to be re-downloaded (as according to the Official Forum thread, it replaces the entire current beta folder).

New Milestone Reached: 2000 Views!

I wasn't originally planning on writing an article today, but after some thought I decided to write a short article celebrating a new viewing milestone.

When I started my blog early in January I wasn't expecting that many viewers who would be interested. I expected to get a few thousand views by the end of the semester. Recently, I passed the 2000 view marker with the semester only half over! Therefore, I want to thank everyone who showed interest in my blog. Expect even more content in the future =).