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.

Big bird

This weekend my Druid Eillebill hit level 68 and gained Flight Form! I’ve wanted this since level 32, but it’s even better than I imagined. I can hit a hot-key and poof I’m flying. No delay time like my mount. I can float in the air indefinitely. Pretty cool.

While you can’t become a bird in combat, you can swoop in, bug someone and fly off. I suspect that if I get hit hard enough, I’ll be forced to change, but that has not been the case with other forms. As long as you are not touching the ground, most things can’t hit you (Fel Cannons being an big exception. Yes. You can be shot down.)

One thing that has been super cool is the cherry picking you can do on herbs. I just turn on my detect herbs ability and fly over an area. When the little yellow blip appears, I swoop from the sky at terminal velocity. I grab the herbs and take off. Often times, the local mobs don’t even bother me, or I can fly back up before it gets messy.

So what’s the biggest annoyance. The head on the flight form looks like a werewolf with sideburns.

Notice in the picture below, how small the toon is in the center. This is because Blizzard quietly added a feature to push the camera further back. This lets you see people attacking from behind. It also let’s you do a top town view (ala Warcraft or Diablo) that is very informative.

Exhibit A

How do you do it?
1. Go to Options and click on Interface.

Options

2. Click on Camera. Move the ‘Max Camera Distance’ slider to the right.

Camera settings

3. Click Okay and click Return to Game.

Now when you zoom in and out with your camera, you  will get a wider view of the action.

Note: if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can use that to zoom in an out. If you have one of the recent notebooks you can use the two-finger scroll on the track pad to zoom in and out. Try it, it really helps your situational awareness.

Kurn.

That’s right. We’re Mac users, most of our Macs come with Mics built in. They come with Speakable Items. What could be better than to speak a command during those busy times when your fingers are glued to the keys.

Over the weeks to come, we will be posting more and more information about Apple’s Speakable Items. We will discus versions of the OS that support it, and we will post a growing library or speech commands for WOW. We will also try to disect them for you so you can make your own.

If you have any helpful Speakable Items that you want to share here, please send them to kurn at wowszer.com.

Your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. Bejeweled will be rolled into the next update of WOW. At least that’s what wired says. (And they are responsible journalists – I’m told).

Go see for yourself. We’ll be here keeping the coffee warm.

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

Check you or your PUG’s gear, overall spec, and basic stats on the fly using Warcraft Characters. Simply enter a character’s name and you’re seconds away from viewing robust information from Blizzard’s Armory! – their site

(more screens availalbe at the site)

Best of all it’s free from the iPod store.

Note from management: we do not get anything for this mention, we just think it’s super cool.

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.