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Sorry we’ve been so quite lately. We’ve had a perfect storm of work combined with research for our upcoming feature: Speech Commands in WOW!

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.

Ordinarily, I would have skipped this, but OMG Some lady down the street from Blizzard South got a $100k research grant??!

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

The omniscient folks at WOW insider have unearthed a frightening shocking amazing factoid. Pre-orders of the Collector’s Edition of Wrath of the Litch King are sold out at GameStop and Amazon.

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.

OMG! They (rudi.com) made a cool little app for the iPhone. It’s like Armory for you iPhone. It even works with an iPod touch (big hint to any birthday gift givers). How cool is that?

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.

In case you have been living under a rock (or in Iraq), Wrath of the Litch King has an offically announced release date. I know this because Blizzard is taking pre-orders

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.

Quite a long time ago, there was a discussion about adding new emotes to WOW. There was much demand for ‘teabag‘ – So I suspect Blizzard blew the idea off. I on the other hand kept thinking about it. Here are a few of my ideas:

1. Reading Map. When ever a player is viewing their map, their toon would be holding up a map. Each race could have their own variation. You could have one race holding an old moldy scape of paper, while another might hold it upside down. You get the idea. Then parties would be able to see when some one’s attention was distracted and cover her in a fight. Or…PvP players would know who wants paying attention. You could even have feints where people put up transparent maps on their screen and wait for an ambush. It could be a lot of fun.
2. Checking Journal. Similar to maps but for all the other junk in the UI. Quest logs, Guild screens, Professional skills. The animation might be anything from the toon digging through a backpack to pulling out a writing desk to make notes. They could even have class specific animations. Mages could scribble with floating paper and glowing ink.

What ideas do you have? Click on comments below

So, I dug up some real news on the Wrath boards. It seems that there was a little bit of panic when Mac users were crashing with some of the latest updates to WOW.

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

Have you ever wished that you could see more of the scenary? Maybe the scenic vistas of Nagard? Maybe you just wish there was less clutter on your screen.

Well, you can. There are two simple tools that will help you out. Both are found under the Video options in-game.

1. Your first option is the ‘Resolution’ menu. It will allow you to make everything more detailed an reveal more items on the screen. The higher the setting, the more screen real estate you get.

2. The second tool is ‘Use UI Scale’ check box. With this marked, you can move the slider to the left and shrink all user interface elements. This includes your mini-map and your toolbars.

You must close the Video options window to see the results of your changes.

Video Settings

A little childish

Woody over at GU Comics posted a humours cartoon featuring a jerk who kills fight masters. I thought I’d share.