I was playing a Death Knight, killing lots of Scarlet Crusaders the other day, when it hit me. Wrath is just like Empire Strikes Back.

Stay with me here.

1. They both start in place filled with Ice.

2. You get attacked constantly.

3. You take part in huge battles with cool vehicles.

4. You are related to a big bad dude, who wears black and talks with a deep voice.

5. The bad guy has mysterious magical powers.

6. The bad dude has a big glowing sword and commands thousands of troops.

7. There is swampy forest that has small creatures with funny voices.

8. There is a floating city in the clouds (Dalaran / Cloud City). If you step off the ledge, you go splat.

9. If you play the hero, then the big bad dude is your father (sort of).

10. [edit] They both made absurd amounts of money on the opening weekend.

What am I missing??

It’s been Guild tested and Monster approved

If you talk to a barber, he will inform you that he can change Tattoos. After some investigation (asking a GM), I learned that only female night elves, or 1 in 20 possible character combinations, can actually do this. (See below)

On the positive side, I had a good talk with a GM. He/She was both supportive of our site and encourages players to use the forums to post ideas: such as tatoos

Soooo…Use those forums. Blizzard is listening.
Kurn out.

It gets better: The National Science Foundation is funding research to see why US players use more mods/plug ins than asian players.

If someone gave me $50, I’d tell them that gold farmers in the east use fewer plugins becuase that would take time away from work.

On the other hand, Bonnie Nardi is a faculty member in the Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. She’s published two papers on WOW already.
Learning Conversations in World of Warcraft (2007)

Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft (2006)

and she blogs (see her post about Shat).

Nonetheless. I say, “$100k if a professor’s salary at some schools.” Did she just pay the rent for her department? If I had $100k, I’d pay my debts off and take my family to Disneyland (with a possible stop off at Blizzard headquarters in Irvine, CA.

Kurn out

Ok, close your mouth. You knew people wanted this stuff. In case you missed it, that’s 2 days. Modona doesn’t sell tickets that fast.

WOW insider mentioned that Blizzard likes to limit the run on Collector’s Editions, but still. This is Crack People! Crack I say.

Rest assured, there will be bugs opportunities to refine and retool the game, and lots of content will be added a year later (cough cough Burning Crusades cough cough).

It seems like a bit of a scam to me that they can sell you an expansion and then keep adding to it while charging you every month. Sigh. go blizzard go.

One poster, Nakos, claimed:

I suggest checking the Mac Tech Support forum for details, if you’re not a tester, you can’t post, but you can still read: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?sid=2000&forumId=7573591

Radoslawn is the Mac Q&A person and has been very helpful.

He’s said that he has not yet been given the technical specs for what the final release will require, but he will pass them on when he has them.

In particular, the most recent beta builds have included some corrupted models which cause the client to crash, those are still being tracked down.

Additionally, WotLK will have a new, vehicle interface, people using older Macs have been disconnected when using some aspects of this interface. This appears to affect PPC Macs, but not Intel Macs.

Radoslawn has said the graphics requirements of WotLK will probably be higher than the existing ones.

At this point, it seems that the beta client has not yet been optimized to run on the Mac, so some issues may be related to how the port is being done. It’s still early in the beta test, much will change prior to the expansion going live.

I looked into the issue of people having trouble installing patches on the Mac. Here is what Radoslawn suggests:

Seeing more of this issue as well, so let me list a few of the basics:
( but please post about the issue if these following steps won’t help, I’ll keep adding any procedures I missed )

I. Game has been moved

- if the game was moved from the initial place it was installed then the patch can’t find it

Possible solution:

1. go to Macintosh HD => Users => Shared => Blizzard
2. delete the file : com.blizzard.World of Warcraft.prefs
3. start WotLK

II. Permissions have gotten corrupted

Please use the steps below to repair file permission settings
on the hard drive you have installed World of Warcraft.

1.) click on the Finder icon in the Dock
2.) open the Applications folder
3.) open the Utilities folder
4.) double click on the Disk Utility application icon
5.) select the hard drive the game is installed on
6.) select the First Aid option
7.) click on the Repair Disk Permissions button

- or -

1. Select the Wrath of the Lich King Beta folder
2. press Command + i
3. in the Wrath of the Lich King Beta Info box, go to the Sharing & Permissions section
4. click on the lock and unlock it
5. make sure you have Read & Write permissions
6. click on the Burst icon ( cog wheel ) and select Apply to enclosed items

III. Patch is corrupted

- Please, please, please do not use wireless if you can use a wired connection. Too many issues with wireless to list.

- delete patch and start download again

IV. Hard Drive Directory is corrupted

Repair Directory Procedure:

1. (re)start the computer
2. right after the computer starts press Cmd(Apple)+s until you get a black screen with white type
3. let go of the keys when this screen comes up
4. at the cursor please type the following: fsck -f -y and press return
5. please be aware that some of the procedures will look like they are frozen,
but are actually taking a long time i.e checking hierarchy
6. if anything had to be repaired, repeat step 4
7. once things are repaired type exit and press return
8. computer will boot into Mac OS

IV. Game is corrupted and cannot be overwritten ( last resort fix )

In order to remove World of Warcraft safely from your system, you will need to:

1. go to Mac HD/Applications folder and move your Wrath of the Lich King Beta to the Trash
2. go to your Mac HD/Users/Shared folder and move the Blizzard folder to the Trash
3. empty Trash
4. Install Wrath of the Lich King Beta, then download and install the patches

The offical link to this issue is: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8557028338&sid=2000

Thank you Eillebill for the introduction and adding me as admin to this site!

Yes I discovered WOW earlier this year and was hooked withing the first 15 seconds of play time. Eillebill and I have been friends for many years, worked together, and spent a lot of time playing other online games such as Diablo & Diablo II. Now that I am on the east coast, WOW allows us to still socialize and keep in touch. My missus realizes the value of of my friendships and lets me play whenever I can. However the three hour time difference makes for some late nights/early mornings for me :0)

Although I have several characters I created to try the different classes, my paladin, Geoffreymala is my favorite and yes the race is on to Lvl 70 my friend!

I am partial to Paladins- Geoffreymala is actually named after an AD&D paladin, Geoffrey Malachite of AmberWyvwern™ I played for nigh twenty years. This persona is even my persona in the SCA. And AmberWyvern™ is the name of my company. Obsessive? Probably…. Another story? Yup…. Gonna elaborate? Nope, not on this blog….

I first started using Apple computers in the early 1980s. I have had many many Apples over the years and several Macs. By the time we moved to New England, I had amassed seventeen Mac Plus, two Imagewriter printers, an Apple SCSI Scanner, two Mac Classic, one Color Classic, an Apple IIe, a Power Mac 1600, an Apple IIsi, a B&W G3, a Powerbook G3 Pismo, and a couple of Newtons. I am a techno addict-

Needless to say that I parted with nearly all my Apple hardware when I moved. I kept the Pismo and the B&W. Oh parting is such sweet sorrow, all those toasters, alas they are gone.

Earlier this year, after many many years, miles, and hours of service my Pismo was showing its age so I bought a new 15.4″ MacBook Pro 2.33 Core 2 with 2GB RAM and the Draft N wireless. The perfect platform for WOW Burning Crusade. As I indicated earlier I am a bit of a technology junkie. I have an Internet connection that averages 8-12Mbps downloads, and 2Mbps uploads. It costs more but there is no lag in WOW. Coupled with a Belkin N1 Vision wireless router, and my adventures can take place from any place within 300 feet of our apartment. (But boy does the battery get sucked dry fast when I am WOWing an battery power- 50 minutes tops)

To allow my nephews to play, I opened a second WOW subscription and have my Home Theater PC set up with WOW so one nephew can play on the MacBook and the other can play onthe PC on the two wall mounted 19″ widescreen HD monitors and wireless KB.

Well this introduction was sure longer than I expected. And I am so close to 65 I can taste it!

Geoffrey

Most of Blizzard’s programming is done on Macs. I read an article on the subject a long time ago and the comment the person made was along the lines of “we don’t know why more games are not released for Macs. Most programmers that we know of write their scripts on Macs for gaming.” I always found it to be an interesting comment on the gaming industry.

I have NEVER heard this before, but it’s one hell of a cool rumor.