WoW Elitists

See it for yourself.

Hi, come read about how bad I fucked up!

I fail at elite.

With Blizzard's announcement of making the 1-58 grind faster, who here plans to roll an alt once that goes into effect?

And further, will this change render leveling guides obsolete?

WTS 70 druid. pst

All this talk of gypsies makes me want to roll another rogue. You know, pickpocketing.

A recent post on the R+D forums links to a thread on the Nihilum forums where many Nihilum members implicitly admit to buying gold and supporting the act of doing so to fund their various ingame financial needs.

Justifiable? Not justifiable? My thoughts are thus:

1) There's no essential difference between buying gold to fuel your progression and using any other kind of PvE exploit to do so. I invoked the example of Overrated's hacking AQ40 to get easy C'Thun loots and getting banned... the rationale for each act is fundamentally the same: "We don't feel like going through the intended motions to acquire loot, so we circumvented them. Nyah nyah." I'm inclined to say that the whole range of this kind of activity should be condemned. I understand that consumable farming is a bitch and many players wouldn't be able to do it, and that even when they can it's more efficient to just work a few extra hours every week and buy gold with that cash. And I think, then, it's incumbent upon these people to call upon Blizzard to correct these issues whether or not they feel forced into exploiting the system. Consumable use is being nerfed in 2.1, but these issues will still exist, and I personally would adopt a zero-tolerance policy towards them.

2) It's not exactly a victimless act. As the OP in the R+D forum implied, if encounters are being tuned around the assumption of consumable use, because uberguilds can afford this rate of consumable use, then this just means that the race to the bottom is already complete. That doesn't mean the result can't be rolled back, though, if rules regarding gold-buying were enforced more stringently. In general, if players find an easy way to "get ahead", and Blizzard has to tune new content with those players in mind, it effects everyone.

But regardless, it's an interesting phenomena and should spur an interesting debate. I may x-post this later, but for now I'll just put it here.

I have some spare invites for Rupture, a WoW-themed social networking site made by the guy who did Napster. It's pretty slick and a fantastic way to waste time looking at other peoples' characters. You can see gear, reps, and even arena matches and raids. Why use it instead of the Armory? I don't know, to be honest; but this site came out before the Armory and still is cool in its own little way.

Sample character
Spying on Death and Taxes

In any case, if you want an invite, leave a comment with your e-mail address.

I just saw this topic come up in worldofwarcraft as I came upon the thread myself personally and still have the urge to post it here.

What is your opinion of the changes being placed upon elixirs? Do you feel this solves any of the current problems related to alchemy's importance in a raiding situation? Is there an alternative way you think Blizzard can handle this?

That apparently not letting someone who isn't in your guild raid with you is akin to racism?

I certainly didn't until I read this thread.

"Don't think I'm just saying this for the benefit of those of us who aren't in gravity. Just like a company that won't hire blacks, clannishness hurts Gravity. If you won't take people on your raids who aren't in your guild, then you are closing off opportunity for not only the people you reject (who can't benefit from your skills) but for the people in your guild (who can't benefit from the skills of those barred from entering)."

(This is from my realm's forums, Gravity is an allianceside raiding guild and this was originally spammed in their recruitment thread.)

NOW while I will concede that there is a point there in that taking people who aren't guilded can sometimes be beneficial due to the fact that a good player is a good player, the execution of it is ALL. WRONG.

After all, you can only recruit people who AREN'T already in your guild, thus it's necessary to take non-guilded people sometimes on test runs.

However, to claim that non guilded people automatically deserve a spot in guild runs and that it's unfair for raiding guilds to leave those people out is like, "WTF?" Raiding guilds run like machines and each player is a cog or a wheel. If you start throwing random screws in there, it will either go really really well, or things will just jam up entirely.

I have a belief that anyone who actually takes the time to go through an application process in order to get a spot does in fact deserve that spot more than a random class lead's friend off the street. But maybe that's just me, because the poster in that thread clearly disagrees. Asshats exist in an out of guilds, but at least sharing the guild tag is a slight sign that you can trust them more than someone else.

Guild alliances and PuG raiding can work, of course, but not as well as more organized guilds.

Thoughts, arguments, flames?

I've been having a real issue with my shadow priest not really being effective for grinding so I changed my spec around a little bit and came up with this. Between Inner Focus, Vengeance of the Illidari and Glowing Crystal Insignia it has been better grinding. I can go about 5-7 mobs now without drinking or potions. Maybe more if I'm pushing myself or accidentially aggro. With the girlfriend/kids away for the weekend, I was able to crank out 3 levels in 3 days.

Any other suggestions other than improving my gear? I'm not able to do dungeon runs at the moment, so... that's out of the works for me for the time being.

I doubt any of you would fall for it, but just in case...

For example. DO NOT CLICK THE LINK.

It's basically a "Blizzard helps police catch pedo!" in the subject line. A few people have actually fallen for it. I almost did until I saw the link. It's being spammed on all the realm forums.

As always, if you think you've fallen victim to a keylogger (it happens to the best of us) Delete your cache/cookies and immediately run your virus, stinger, spybot/adaware, THEN change your passwords.

Here's a good updated blue post about account security and what to do, along with helpful (and being that it's on the WoW forums, not-so-helpful) tips from other people.

I think this discussion sums up all the problems in World of Warcraft, if not the universe.

Ok, maybe that's a little trite. In the very least, it's entertaining.

Not sure if there's any web developers on here, but the secret to parsing the XML file at Blizzard's Armory is the user agent. Because of the AJAX scripting involved there, any time you try to use curl or any other http_get() function and stuff, it'll grab the entire page rendered. You can bypass the javascript by using this as the user agent string "Mozilla/5.0 Gecko/20070219 Firefox/2.0.0.2" and that will give you the raw XML file that makes up that page.

For example, in CFML, I would do this:
<cfset theURL = "http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Arygos&n=Onikai" >
<cfset theUserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 Gecko/20070219 Firefox/2.0.0.2">
<cfhttp url="#theURL#" result="test" userAgent="#theUserAgent#"></cfhttp>
<cfdump var="#XMLParse(test.Filecontent)#">

You can now make a nightly script that goes and obtains the XML file, brings it back to your webspace, parse it, insert it into databases and not have to worry about manually entering in people's professions, levels, etc. All you then have to do is make an association between a character and someone on your guild forum. Easy one to one/many relationship.

I don't understand why Blizzard doesn't embrace the web technology a little more. There's no reason why Blizzard can't provide a XML Feed or a webservice for developers to use and get data. Yes, I'm sure they're concerned about the sheer amount of traffic. I'm sure that the Blue Tracker takes a considerable amount of spidering/crawling over the WoW forums to get after and it seems that Blizzard is 'aware' of the Blue tracker and sometimes even referred to it. If I had to guess, I'm going to say they just don't want to support it.

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Thank you for your time.