Monthly Archives: July 2010

Playstyle

Very Serious Issue.

11 Comments

We interrupt this regularly scheduled (hah) blog post to bring you some pretty serious news:

Pretty soon, posting on Blizzard forums will require you to reveal your real first and last names.

The safety and privacy ramifications of this are horrific, from people like doctors and teachers whose careers could be ruined to gamers dealing with stalkers, crazy exes and other people they have to get away from for safety’s sake.

This is a ridiculous, terrible move for Blizzard to make. I understand that they’re trying to improve the quality of their forum conversations, but there are other ways to do that that don’t require people to put their livelihoods, lives, or just peace of mind at risk.

Do Not Want.

Game Info

Third Time, Still Lucky

7 Comments

I’ve been extremely lucky in scoring a beta test key for Cataclysm – this will be my third beta (I never played the original WoW beta) and I have to say that I really, really enjoy betas. There are some parts of them that are more fun than the live game, in fact.

So, I spent half the weekend downloading the Cataclysm client and its many, many, many patches (and exceeded my internet quota to boot!) and I’ve been poking around and I’m pretty impressed.

(You’re shocked, right? :))

This beta feels very different to past betas; there’s no one obvious place to go to level, there’s no central hub city like Shattrath or Dalaran. There are various breadcrumbs from existing Azeroth to the new zones, but – unlike past expansions – there are so many changes, big and small, in old Azeroth that it’s easy to get distracted poking around what’s changed.

I’d hoped to provide a fly-through video of the new-and-improved Stormwind, but unfortunately I’m having trouble recording decent quality videos at the moment, so that will have to wait. In the meantime, I’m working on a rundown of the paladin changes in Cataclysm – there are some very interesting design decisions becoming apparent – and I hope to post it ASAP.

Uncategorized

…echo…echo…echo…

31 Comments

Well.

It hasn’t quite been a year since I vanished so precipitously, and I’ve felt guilty for it pretty much every day of that year. The truth is that I was rapidly running out of steam due to various RL factors, and I didn’t have the time or energy to overcome it — but, equally, I wasn’t ready to just quit and say goodbye, so I kept promising myself “I’ll post tomorrow…” and tomorrow, as everybody knows, never comes. And the silence stretched and became uncomfortable, and I figured everyone would have given me up as a flake.

And who knows, maybe you have! I certainly couldn’t blame you if you had. But I’m back, and for those of you that are still listening, I’m keen to get back on the horse. Drop me a line if you’re still around; I’m so very out of touch with the blogosphere these days!

So, over the next little while I’ll be spiffing this place up a bit, blowing the dust off the fixtures, finally fixing the readability issues in IE6 (I hope). The blogging bug never really went away; I’ve recently started blogging over at iPaddendum, my iPad app review blog, and I have another project in mind for a few months’ time. But none of that quite satisfies the desire to talk about WoW and paladins, so here I am: I’m back. I hope you’ll give me a second chance. :)