Tuesday, September 13, 2011

MMO Nazi says: No WoW For Me!

Due to some family medical issues, I have had to temporarily cancel my WoW subscription. I'll be keeping up with developments by listening to The Instance, however, and I am pretty sure I can sneak in 10 minutes of Forsaken World once in a while, so I don't go bat-sh!t crazy.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Thinking of taking a break from WoW?

Personally I haven't had time to WoW for nearly a month due to some family medical issues, but if you have a Steam account, you might like to try Forsaken World (or go to http://fw.perfectworld.com/ to get it direct). It's free-to-play and you can easily pop in for 10 minutes or so and get something done.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Humor(?): CAPTCHAS for Dummies

How to keep the illiterati off the Internet

This provides its own comments.

Add-Ons: Watto

Watto has replaced AutoProfit X2 in my add-ons list ; it's a vendor-interaction mod that sells all your gray items at the click of a button. Additionally, Watto makes it easy to buy stacks of items, and has both general and "personal" (e.g., per-toon) exclusion lists to either automatically sell, or not sell, any items you add to them. Please do read the ChangeLog; there are more features than I have time to list here. Watto can be downloaded from Curse or directly from the author's website on Google.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Tip: Gear up without Heroics

You're Level 85. You'd like to start raiding, or at least running some heroics. But you don't have the gear! How do you get the gear to go get the gear? Catch 22!

Fortunately, Blizzard has thought of that. And Silix over at Epic Diapers has thoughtfully put together a "how-to" on getting gear good enough to get you started. Silix does a segment on The Instance also; you should listen!

Add-ons: Spammenot

Are you tired of gold farmer spam? Sick of seeing immature boys linking spells and items along with body part references? Then you need Spammenot!

From the developer's comments:

SpamMeNot intelligently detects, blocks and reports commercial and annoying spam messages before you even see them

Also:

SpamMeNot is being [has been] completely rewritten for the Wrath of the Lich King Expansion.
  • Configurable spam score level means you can tighten up the spam detection or relax it as you desire.
  • The level it auto-reports at is also configurable.
  • Monitors the trade channel for people linking an exceptional amount of spell links as well as keywords such as "An*l" and "Dirge" and will flag and auto-report participants of mass trade spam.
  • 3rd party AddOns can ask SpamMeNot to filter their events via it's API.
  • Nicer configuration interface.
  • Much more organized internal structure.
  • Less chance of causing code taints.
You can get Spammenot from Curse or through Wowmatrix.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Quick Tip: XP (sometimes without combat)

Even though Blizzard has made leveling from 1 to 85 incredibly faster than anyone in vanilla WoW would have ever dreamed possible, there are still a few things that may not be obvious to the new player, to speed you on your way to End Game and the exalted Level 85 leetness.

  • Multi-Quest! It may seem obvious, but as soon as you enter a new quest hub, pick up every quest you can. Many of them can be completed at the same time and in the same area, so you don't have to keep running back to the quest-givers to turn in and pick up new ones. Time saved can be used for other things that grant XP, such as:
  • As soon as you possibly can, pick up Mining and Herbalism. Don't forget to buy a Mining Pick! Both of these trade skills grant XP, so you will want to level them up along with your toon, and the side benefits are improved stamina, Lifeblood (a self-healing spell given only to Herbalists), and a steady income from the Auction House.
  • Again, as soon as you possibly can, start doing the daily quests for Cooking and Fishing. You'll get skill-ups for both of those skills in addition to cash and XP.
  • Set aside the cash you will need to get your mount. The added movement speed makes quest and gathering much faster.
  • Create a "bank toon" and run him or her to the nearest city with a bank, Auction House, and mailbox. Mail the fruits of you labors in Mining and Herbalism to this toon, and sell them on the AH. Use the add-on Auction Lite to help you set prices for fast sales without excessive discounts.
Comments with more tips always welcome!