Tag Archive - WoW

Starting fresh

September 26, 2011 in PC Gaming with 0 Comments

So I finally finished my World of Warcraft “experiment”. Final balance: 100k gold, 4 level 80 characters but not a single one at cap (85). Since I’m not planning on returning to the game within the next couple of years I took about 90% of that gold and invested it in various vanity items (elementium geodes for example) and Cataclysm trade goods. Basically I didn’t want to worry about in-game inflation urging me to come back any time soon.

The next step was to purge my gaming rig of all the WoW stuff like update clients, dual-boxing tools, backup scripts and some such. I wanted to make absolutely sure to get rid of every piece of WoW-ware that was now possibly on my system. A clean reinstall of the operating system was in order. Continue Reading…

Geek out on European WoW market statistics

May 30, 2011 in Gaming, PC Gaming with 0 Comments

In my time playing World of Warcraft I was fascinated by a website called The Undermine Journal. Completely searchable market data with various graphs and statistics. Basically an almost indispensable resource for everyone remotely interested in the economy of WoW. Sadly there were currently no plans to make it available to EU players. Acy from the EU server Hellscream changed that singlehandedly and seemingly overnight. He created a nice, clean and lightweight site, http://www.wowtrader.org.uk/, that’s easy to use and provides many of the features I’ve talked about above. But instead of crawling the Armory/Mobile AH webpages 24/7 it depends on crowd-sourcing (i.e. user submitted data, by uploading a single file from an Add-On) so it will only be as good as its users make it. Acy keeps everyone updated about the project on his blog. He generally seems like an approachable and competent fella so I’m confident it will be a success with a little help from the community.

The advantages of unrealistic graphics

March 15, 2011 in Gaming with 1 Comment

I’ve recently started to mess around with WoW which lead me to the realization that seemingly outdated graphics can have their advantages.
Aside from obvious things like a silky smooth, constant framerate no matter what, older graphics are also miles away from the uncanny valley and if done well invoke an almost comic-like atmosphere.
In Star Trek Online for example you almost expect voiceovers and cut-scenes but in WoW your imagination is already much more engaged by filling in the gaps of low polygon models and low resolution textures. So if you just read that a Gnome looks at an Orcish letter, folds it in half, takes a smell at it and proclaims that it could be toilet-paper it is not breaking the immersion. Continue Reading…

A brief overview of the MMOs I’ve played over the years.

February 15, 2011 in Gaming, PC Gaming with 0 Comments

Anarchy Online: I started when the Shadowlands expansion came out, joined an RP guild, played a Nano-something (basically a mage class) and a martial artist. It was fun for a while but eventually I quit playing because grinding randomly generated missions became tiresome. And let’s not even talk about non-instanced dungeons with seemingly hundreds of people spawn-camping the bosses.

EVE Online: I started my spacefaring career as a miner (Doesn’t everyone?). Then I started doing missions. Then I mined in a bigger ship. Then I did missions in a bigger ship. I did this until I was in a Hulk for mining and a Battleship for doing missions. Continue Reading…