New WoW General Discussion Thread 6/8/10

The Game Room
441

I have the following sitting as a draft in my email box since I woke up this morning, seeing as the forums were offline for posting at that point:

Why I Won’t Be Using RealID

RealID is a new feature with some great functionality that almost no one is going to use, including me. This boils down to a fundamental aspect of WoW and other Blizzard games that the developers seem to have forgotten: they are not a social networking site. On Facebook, I have a reason to let people see my real name and let their friends see my real name. But even in my EMAIL, I can choose what name to display and whether or not I appear online (in GChat). Some of us play with at least one real-life friend. But those of us who’ve been playing the game for longer than five minutes have a vast array of ONLINE friends–people whose playstyles and in-game company we enjoy. However, that doesn’t mean we trust them like real-life friends (or that we trust our real-life friends to only friend people we also want to have access to us), or that we want them to know where we are every second of every day. The current implementation means that people have to choose between a complete–and potentially dangerous or at least frustrating–lack of privacy, and no cross-server or cross-game communication capabilities.

How to Fix It

1.) Allow me to create an alias. This could be my real name; it could be a nickname; it could be the name of my main character; it could be the name of a small Eastern European country. Preferably, it should be unique to me, so that friends can add each other without having to give away one-half of what should be the privileged information required to access their accounts.

2.) Allow me to designate an auto-availability for each character. For instance, if I have a Druid on an RP server that no one else knows about that I like to play by myself to unwind, I should be able to toggle a “hidden” setting that makes it never even show up on my list of characters–let alone display as online if I’m playing it.

3.) Allow me to set an availability every time I log in to my account or a toon–not just “online, away, or busy,” but also “hide”–so that I can appear to be offline if I want.

4.) Allow me to create subsets of my friends list, so that if I want to appear online for some people but not others, I can do so.
In summary: Treat RealID more like an IM program and less like a social networking site.

442

Absolutely right. Even some of my fondest friends in-game are not necessarily people I want to know every single time I am in-game.

I particular like your point #3 - I wish there was something stronger than the current Do Not Disturb setting that would make me unreachable via whisper (and appear offline unless you were standing right in front of me).

But until they implement at least #1 and #2 I will not be signing up, even for the handful of RL friends that play with me - I have a cell phone and IM they can use for that.

443

Exactly. The people I’d be inclined to add to my RealID… I already coordinate with via text messages, phone calls, and FB posts/PMs.

444

My own real example of this: My pally is only wearing 2 pieces of T9: the gloves and the legs. When I finally started running heroics on my pally, she already had iLvl 264 shoulders, iLvl 245 chest, and iLvl 226 helm, all purchased from the AH. She was in iLvl 200 gloves and legs, so the T9 (iLvl 232) pieces were clear upgrades there. The T9 shoulders and chest would be major downgrades, so I skipped those, obviously. The helm I had to dither over, but I finally decided that the upgrade from iLvl 226 to 232 was too slight to bother with. Instead, I saved up 75 Triumphs and bought the iLvl 245 Helm of Thunderous Rampage from the Triumph vendor over in the portal building.

When I have enough Frosts, I’ll probably only end up getting the T10 gloves and legs, again because those will be the biggest upgrades (232 -> 251). Going 245 -> 251 on my helm and chest aren’t a priority, which is why I’m currently saving my Frosts for the iLvl 264 off-set chest piece (and besides, that chest piece visually matches my shoulders, and the off-set belt I already bought).

My mage ran Ahune yesterday, and got the pet! It throws snowballs at me! (Surprised the hell out me the first time - I was riding through Hinterlands on my way to desecrate the Horde fire at that troll village on the coast, and this snowball came out of nowhere and hit me in the back of the head.) I’ll keep running my mage in there and hope the staff drops - the only other staff upgrade she can get outside of a raid is dropped by Tyrannus in H:PoS, but she hasn’t had any luck there so far. My pally ran Ahune twice, mainly because the first time I forgot to turn in the quest and when I tried just entering the instance normally the NPC wasn’t there. I also want to keep trying for the tank cloak for her.

After my mage’s group killed Ahune, somebody in the group said something like, “What chevo?”, and then whispered to me, “Link your chevo”. I had no idea what he was talking about. My best guess is that “chevo” must be the new word for “achievement”, but if so it must only be on that guy’s server because I’ve never seen it on any of my servers. That, or the guy just couldn’t spell. In any case, if he meant “achievement”, I still didn’t know which one he was talking about.

My pally has successfully stolen the flames from Silvermoon, UC, and Org. The first two were easy-peasy, but I died three times in Org (it was rather amusing how, each time I died, I became part of a train of Alliance ghosts running from the Razor Hill graveyard back to Org …). The Horde players in Org managed to kill me before I could get the flame the first time, but I was successful at grabbing it before I died the second time. That would have been my last death, except I decided that I’d try to go fishing as long as I was there (for The Fishing Diplomat achievement), but that didn’t work out and I got killed a third time. Because there were enough NPCs involved in killing me each time (and probably landing the killing blow at least once), and the fact that after the third I rezzed at the Spirit Healer, I came out of Org with a 40g repair bill … yeah, I was wearing my PvP set, but all my PvE gear was in my bags, most of it with a higher iLvl than my PvP gear, so more expensive to repair. I also discovered that DKs can apparently still Chains of Ice me even when I’m bubbled.

About that torch juggling: Do the torches get used up when I try to juggle them, or can I just get my stack of 40 and keep reusing them until I’m successful?

445

1- Are you sure some priest didn’t mass dispel your bubble?

2- You keep them as long as you’re the one who catches them.

Got everything but the torch achievement yesterday on my rogue, as I bought too many goodies and didn’t leave enough blossoms to buy extra torches. That’ll be after today’s dailies, if the servers ever come back up.

446

Nah, my bubble was still visible for several seconds after the CoI hit me. OTOH, I was able to keep moving, strangely enough, albeit slowly. I only made it about 20 yards from the fire before my bubble popped and I went down.

Coolness!

447

You can’t be snared while you’re under divine shield.

448

As Palooka said, AFAIK bubble grants immunity to just about everything a player can throw at you (aside maybe from mass dispel). I think you may just have been the unlucky recipient of a rare, but not unheard of, simul-glitch.

449

Could be. Later on, somebody in my mage’s guild (same server) was having trouble trying to get the flame in Org because “I can’t see anybody or interact with anything!”

450

reads the patch notes on Vote Kick

You know what I want to see? Dungeon Cooldown times on the same system. I rarely leave a group in progress, and that’s after everything has gone to shit. I’m almost always the one that’s willing to keep on going when everyone else says screw it. But if I leave, I still get the full 15 minute cooldown.

I’d also like to see the cooldown proportionate to how long you’ve been in the queue. Tanks and healers are the quickest to bail because they hardly ever have to wait in the queue.

451

paces around This is the first time I’ve seen an outage. Come on, login server, come back up! That’s the most annoying thing. Cairne is up, but I can’t actually log in.

452

I’d be fine with it if Blizzard gave us the actual reasons for the downtime and didn’t just keep extending the “extended maintenance”. :stuck_out_tongue:

453

Cairne is full. Position in queue:350. Haven’t seen that in forever!

454

I’m actually kind of glad that the login server is acting up. Tonight’s a raid night and I’m feeling a little too wiped to be effective, but I don’t want to sit out yet another night. Yay for unavoidable excuses. :stuck_out_tongue: Although I am kind of twitchy that I can’t do my dailies.

455

This is getting stupid. I can log in, my server is up, it shows me all my toons … but just won’t log them in.

Naturally, I’ve got an 11-hour shift at work tomorrow and a 13-hour shift on Thursday, so really won’t have much time to play those days…

456

Howzabout a fun WoW machinima while we wait:

“Attention Whore” by EmberIsolte (parody of Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi”)

457

<singsong>Thank you, RealID!</singsong>

458

Given that this is compromising one of my guild’s 3 raid days, this RealID nonsense is making me more and more irritated. Sigh.

459

Just tried to log in. Got in briefly, hearthed to Dal, and realized that my out-of-dates hadn’t been checked to load. So I logged off again, did that, and relogged. And stuck at the loading screen.

Alt+tabbed out, shut down WoW, restarted WoW, got to log-in, then same thing. I’m done for the night.

460

Weirdly, my main, who has more addons than any of my other characters, logged in fine, while my bank alt got hung up at the loading screen (both old world). Yay for buggy patches.