Filed under: Horde, Alliance, Human, Night Elves, Orcs, Hunter, Rogue, Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, Draenei

If you’ve ever been fascinated by the MMORPG statistics provided at sites like the Daedalus Project, here’s something right up your alley; the WoW Armory Character Distribution widget, programmed to comb both the U.S. and E.U. Armories and capture data on the popularity of character names across race, class, faction, and sex.

The project is still in the testing stage, and it’s a bit finicky about how you enter character names. Make sure you’re always hitting the submit button and not using your enter key, as otherwise the widget will keep searching for the last name you looked for instead of your new query. Its creator, Emilis, also wrote to warn that it uses live information from both armories and will occasionally be slow as a result. I imagine it might also be inaccurate if either Armory is having problems.

The widget is tremendously fun to play with and has yielded some rather interesting results even with the completely random names I keep trying. “John” and “Mary,” as you might expect, are overwhelmingly Human toons, whereas the greater share of people playing a “Sergei” and “Yekaterina” are Draenei. 3 people with a “Brutus” are actually playing female characters, and 1 person with a “Laura” is playing a male character (Emilis notes that gender-bending names are surprisingly common, although from what I can tell so far this seems to be a lot more true of male names for female toons than the other way around). Most people with a “Killer” are playing a Hunter, Rogue, or Warrior. Characters named “Bank” are mostly Human Warriors, but “Banktoon(s)” are mostly Orcs. And, yes, most of the people playing a toon named Legolas are Night Elf Hunters. Are you really that surprised?

Thanks to Emilis for writing in!

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Filed under: Galleries, Wrath of the Lich King

In the LK beta build that just went live tonight, build number 8905, there’s a new Options button on the login screen, just above Cinematics, Credits, and Terms of Use. What lies behind its blue mystery? [Edit: apparently it was there in the last build too. I never noticed.]

Unsurprisingly enough, it contains some options that you might want to change before entering the game. Specifically, it has options for video resolution, video effect quality, and sound. For the most part, these are the same options currently available in-game. “Enable Reverb,” “Headphone Mode,” and “Death Knight Voices” have been added to the sound pane. “Disable Resize” has been added under “Windowed Mode” in the resolution pane; I’m not sure why you’d want to do that, though, unless you kept accidentally resizing the window (which I’ve never had an issue with, and I often play windowed).

The big innovation here (and yes, I realize innovations in option dialogs may not strike you as particularly interesting) is a master slider for video quality. Now you don’t have to fiddle separately with terrain distance and ground clutter density if you don’t want to; just drag the slider somewhere on the scale from “Low” to “High,” whatever’s prettiest without being too devastating to your framerates on your particular system. Of course, there’s a “Custom” setting, so if you want to tweak all the little sliders, you are still free to do so. A nice change, and it will especially benefit people who don’t necessarily know what all the options mean.

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While I loved being on my rogue, I thought it was time to make another character. I love defending Blacksmith or Lumber Mill and I love the offensive capability of going forth, sapping a guard at a node, and killing the other guy, vanishing and killing the other guy to take a flag. On our […]

Filed under: News items, Wrath of the Lich King

In somewhat unusual news, 7-Eleven seems to be moving into the video game sales business in some capacity. I’ve noticed that 7-Eleven had sold a couple select games like Madden in the past, but I never thought much of it. I assumed they just had some deal with the distributor for that particular game.

However, that’s not actually the case. Their Madden sales turned out to be quite the success, and their demographic is rather gamer heavy. Man, who would have thought a 24-hour convenience store would attract a lot of young gamers? My mind is boggled. As of this season, 7-Eleven has begun offering pre-orders of select major upcoming releases (such as Wrath of the Lich King) at their locations. All of their offerings will have midnight releases at the 24/7 chain, so your next midnight release party might just take place between a Slurpee machine a beef jerky rack. I have a feeling they won’t be holding any costume contests.

Oh, if you’re curious, 7-Eleven says Wrath in Novermber, too. Man, I could actually go for a Slurpee right now. AFK.

[ via Kotaku ]

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Filed under: Jewelcrafting, Wrath of the Lich King

WoW‘s crafting system has always been relatively straightforward. Collect mats, press button, receive item. This lies in contrast to crafting systems from other games, which may contain mini-games, convoluted learning systems, or varying levels of success in production. In WoW, you can’t even fail at making something; if you can make it at all, every attempt will result in an item, and they’re all the same (aside from some recipes with random enchants. This fits in with WoW being on the simple side for MMOs (simple to learn, that is; often difficult to master).

Jewelcrafting in LK is going to shake that up a little bit. There will be a quest available to jewelcrafters that gives them a chance to craft a “perfect” version of an uncommon-quality gem when cutting it. For the first time, it’s possible to have a critical success from crafting in WoW. It looks like the perfect versions of gems are positioned precisely between the uncommon and rare versions of a cut, in terms of stats. For instance:

• Delicate Bloostone: +12 agility
• Perfect Delicate Bloodstone: +14 agility
• Delicate Scarlet Ruby: +16 agility
• Delicate Cardinal Ruby: +20 agility

So far, Gem Perfection appears to work only on uncommon-level gems, not on rares or epics. I also don’t know what the chance is of cutting a perfect gem instead of a regular one. It’s a nice change, and a little something extra for cutting those buckets of green gems on the way from 375 to 450. Would you like to see more critical successes in other crafting professions?

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If you’ve got a 70 that can help you farm some items and quests, it doesn’t need to be extremely costly to make a budget twink Rogue for the 20-29 bracket. A friend had asked what it took to make IBJammin, and while I am not a true twink, I am still able to kill […]

Filed under: Priest, Expansions, Death Knight, Wrath of the Lich King

A lot of people who read Ask a Beta Tester regularly have been asking about how easy Burning Crusade heroics will be at level 80. Can they be 3 manned? Can they be duo’d? This one’s for you, guys. I decided it’s worth a mention all on its own.

Three players, two Death Knights and a Priest, have recently trio’d almost the entirety of Karazhan, minus only Nightbane due to not having completed the quest needed to summon him. Admittedly both Death Knights were using a deep Unholy build which is tuned a little high now, but they’re not wearing any high end gear, either. The spec that the tank used is a bit unusual for an Unholy Tanking build. They didn’t take Bone Shield, and I suspect Magic Suppression being bugged had something to do with its exclusion, though that may have been fixed and I missed it. A fun little detail they discovered is that Gift of Arthas, which procs a disease, is counted as one of your diseases as a Death Knight and augments abilities that scale depending on how many diseases you have active such as Death Strike.

So there’s your answer, ladies and gentlemen. Karazhan can be 3-manned before any raid gear is available, so Burning Crusade heroics will surely be able to be duo’d if you’re still hoping and praying for Anzu come level 80.

[ via DeathKnight.info ]

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I loved my shadow priest when I was leveling up. So, I created a 29 Shadow Priest after my main turned Holy. While that was fun, we had an army of alts that were all level 20 for transmutes and I decided one day to turn Ibjammin into a twink rogue. The first 7k kills […]

Andy Crowther used to have time to play a lot of computer games. Not any more. At 33, he is now a supermarket manager in North London and has a girlfriend. Despite the intrusion of real life, Mr Crowther still enjoys slaughtering hordes of monsters and capturing treasure in online games such as World of […]

Twinking is all about Engineering. So many times we would just have fun. Seeing the reactions from other players, both on Horde or Alliance, is always quite enjoyable. Some of our favorite toys: [item]10518[/item] [item]10501[/item] [item]4852[/item] [item]10716[/item] [item]10720[/item] [item]10724[/item] [item]10721[/item] [item]4388[/item] [item]4384[/item] [item]4397[/item] [item]10646[/item] [item]10726[/item] [item]2091[/item] [item]4381[/item] [item]4395[/item] [item]4397[/item]