The Entrance

Guy Crafting Voidwalker Action Figure

Dwarf Paladin and loldrood?

Draenei Shaman

Warlock

An Artist at Work

Upper Deck Guy Working on a Troll Mini-fig

Shelbi Reppin’ our Guild

Three Rogues and a Paladin

Epic Chair Fail (oh and The Aquabats!)

Pwning the competition in the Costume Contest

Curse you PF Chang’s for running out of warm sake!

These were a few pics from our personal collection but I also recommend DJWu’s BlizzCon 2008 flickr photostream.

Of course, they also go into the whole “creepy adults courting minors” issue, but doesn’t that happen everywhere else online as well? Is it Blizzard’s responsibility to monitor your child’s every move in-game?

In all of these situations, it seems as though the media is trying to push blame on the companies that create the games, rather than the people who play them and commit the crimes. World of Warcraft isn’t the bad guy here. Blizzard didn’t force those parents to leave their baby alone to suffocate so they could go play. No one told that dude to go stab someone IRL for stealing an in-game item.

I don’t see an end to this blame-game. In fact, I think it’s only going to get worse. So, what’s next? Online policing of virtual worlds?? Oh, wait..

A raffle is superior to the previous auction format as it allows us to not limit donations or the chance at winning to the person with the deepest pockets (not that we’re opposed to flexing your wallet for a good cause).

The way the raffle will work is simple. For every $1 that you donate, you get 1 chance out of the total number of dollars donated. So if 50 people each donate $2, everyone will have a 2/100 or 2% chance to win a prize. Numbers will be assigned based on the influx of the payments, so if you are 1st person to donate and you donate $5. You will respectively be assigned numbers 1-5. The next person to donate $1 gets number 6 and so on.

Winners will be chosen online and during a scheduled in-game event. We will /random 1-X (where X is the total $ donated) to determine the winners. You won’t have to be present to win but it would be awesome if we could get as many people as possible to show up. (Level 1 alts ftw). We’ll post more details about the event soon.

Each winner gets to choose 1 of the remaining prizes (1st winner gets first choice) until all the prizes have been exhausted. It’s possible to win multiple prizes but not for the same entry. Example: if we roll a 4 and a 5, and the same person is assigned those entries, then they will win two prizes. If we roll 2 4’s in a row, the person only gets one prize.

So as of right now: the prizes include the following (multiples will be offered as separate prizes):

• Transmogrification of your character (the same as our previous auctions) x 2
• Starprints Warcraft Charm x 5
• Starprints Warcraft Sticker (Set of 3) x 5
• Warlock & Voidwalker Vinyl Sticker (for vehicle application)
• Custom Blog Header by Shelbi

We’ve got plans to procure more prizes before the raffle ends. If you have anything you’d like to donate as prize please contact us. It doesn’t have to be artsy or crafty, pre-paid WoW time cards are always a big hit. Just make sure that its appropriate.

The raffle is currently slated to end on Friday the 14th. This will hopefully give us enough time to get prizes out before the holiday.

We’ll setup a separate page for the donation here. Or you can get right down to donating by clicking below.

All that donate will be listed on our site with their donation amount (with permission). Entries are NOT limited to the US, Canada, or anywhere for that matter. Shelbi and I will be paying all Paypal processing fees and standard shipping costs. Express shipping details can be worked out on a per instance basis (overnight to Singapore can be costly).

1. John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
2. There are plenty of gamers who are the exact opposite of the previous group.
3. With time, come changes.
4. Taking a break from playing every once in a while is extremely healthy.
5. Gaming, like sex, is much better with a partner (or a 40-man group, if you’re into that).

So I now tag the following 5 Bloggers for their responses:

• Kestrel from Kestrel’s Arie
• Girl Meets WoW
• The Eternal Noobie
• Alavennian from SinisterStrike.com
• Matthew Rossi from WoW Insider

I do think that it would take a significant amount of effort to implement such a system in WoW but Blizzard has already got a couple of things in place:

First, if you’re a resourceful engineer or a friend of the Cenarion Expedition you have the ability to call upon the aid of combat-capable pet or ally. Even though they help for merely a few seconds, my Mithril Mechanical Dragonling has been the difference between a successful kill and a long corpse run on more than one occasion.

Second, although I hate escort quests due to their annoying pace, they at least provide the foundation and basic proof of concept for having a functional AI party member. Most of the escorted NPCs walk annoyingly slow yet charge every mob they come in range of and never wait when you’re low on health or OOM. But is this really any different than that warrior in your PUG that wears the +intellect ring and employs the same tactics?

At least you don’t have to compete with the NPC for loot right? Let’s see, how much should a hired mercenary cost? If the price is too low then you’ll trivialize the concept of grouping all together. If you make the price too high, the only people that could afford it would be the mains that are leveling (or twinking) an alt. At a minimum the merc would take its share of the coin drops much like a normal player would. You could supplement this with either extra cash upfront or some sort of lootshare or percentage of the spoils.

There would obviously need to be some constraints. Would you restrict mercenaries to one per group or let up to four tag along? Would you give them a time limit? Keep them an instance-only feature? How would they work on a PVE versus PVP realm? What happens when the group wipes? Does the henchman die for good or make the corpse run with you?

Mercenaries could come in different flavors. For the most part you’ll probably want a healer, a tank, or a combination of the two. If you’re masochistic enough to try level as a tank your healer yourself, then a damage dealer would be the way to go. And how would you control said mercenary? An added action bar seems to work great for locks and hunters but you could also make the NPC semi-smart and respond to /emotes or text commands. There at least needs to be a way to prevent your hired help from pulling a Leeroy Jenkins.

What are your thoughts?

Update:

Thank you all for your comments. Some very excellent points were made. I think that for all intents and purposes, the current 1-58 (and arguably 1-69) game is a singe-player affair. Yeah there are a few instances here and there but I know that its difficult to get a group together even in the higher levels. Henchman that were available only to assist in PVE instances seems like it would be an ideal solution that wouldn’t break existing game balance. You’re basically just replacing a potential party member with an AI controlled character.

Besides finding a group to run an instance with, my biggest setback is the inability to devote a chunk of uninterrupted time for even the shortest of instance runs. “Sorry guys /afk diaper change” is not something I want to drop on any fellow players when we’re in the middle of a boss fight.

I’ve been known to dual box with my laptop and Shelbi’s lock to get one of my many alts through an instance. How awesome would it be if you could bring one of your alts online to run around with you in henchman mode? Effectively leveling up both characters and giving you the versatility of both classes. There could be a quite-worth-it imo XP penalty or even an extra subscription cost involved to appease the higher-ups at Actiblizzion.

Machinima – a film production technique that uses real-time interactive game-engines to create a film or movie.

Now it’s arguable that machinima as a technique probably existed prior to 1996, I would have to give the Pioneer Award to the Rangers (a Quake clan) with their 100-sec short Diary of a Camper. Diary was “shot” using the original Quake’s demo engine and may appear primitive when compared with today’s standards, but it still stands as probably the first widely viewed piece of machinima. This one movie was the catalyst that established the Quake Movie scene, inspiring others to take a swing at this new form of digital puppetry, spawning distribution and review sites, and even creating a market for specialized Quake-movie editing software.

If the Rangers were the pioneers of the technique, Hugh Hancock can be credited for fathering the name Machinima. With the founding of Strange Company and the launch of Machinima.com in 2000, Hugh moved to expand the genre to other game-engines (besides Quake) and expose Machinima works to a wider audience. Strange Company, themselves a group of machinima creators (machinimators? machinimists?), have developed a number of works including the first feature-length machinima Bloodspell and the adaptation of the sonnet Ozymandias that was actually praised by known video-game-disser Roger Ebert.

In time, machinima has been created from a plethora of games that include Halo, the Sims, Second Life, Half-Life and even GTA.

World of Warcraft is no stranger to Machinima either. The immense amount of work out there runs the full gamut from hilarious music-video parodies to amazing action films. Blizzard has even taken to releasing their own machinima shorts to accompany major patch releases. You also have epic pieces from the likes of Baron Soosdon and Dopefish that really push the envelope and have amazing production values.

Machinima has received increasing popularity as of late and has started to pierce the mainstream. As it becomes more viable as not only an art form, but as an effective story-telling method, how long will it be before we start seeing Primetime Machinima on cable TV? Production of Machinima tends to be not-only cheaper but also less-time consuming than typical CGI (computer-generated imagery) animation. With the recent Writer’s Strike and an Actor’s Strike rumored to follow, will the door be opened to machinima-scabs? You still need talent (writers, directors, voice actors and even animators) but I think that we’ve established that such a thing exists.

Or maybe we aren’t ready for the Machinima Movement yet? Graphics still have plenty of room for growth (just steer clear of the valley) and the licensing/royalties/fair use issue is an entirely separate can of worms. Will average (non-gamer) Joe embrace Machinima with open arms or dismiss it as an inferior medium? Despite the hurdles, I personally think that it’s an inevitable direction even if it doesn’t happen soon.

It’s not like the next episode of CSI is going to focus on finding Mankrik’s wife.

Oh wait.

Ingredients:
2lbs lean ground beef
1 serrano pepper
1 14oz can of beef broth
4 oz of tomato sauce
2 1/2 cups of water
1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons of onion powder
2 tablespoons of paprika
1 tablespoon of cumin powder
5 tablespoons of chili powder
1 jar (8 oz) of Huy Fong Chili Garlic Sauce

To Make Pepper Juice:
Chop the pepper and boil it in a couple of ounces of water. Strain and set aside.

Directions:
Brown ground beef in a large skillet or pot. Drain if necessary. While the meat is cooking, make the pepper juice. Once the meat is browned, add cayenne pepper, onion powder, paprika, beef broth, pepper juice, tomato sauce and water. Cook over medium heat for 1 hour.

Add chili powder, cumin and Huy Fong Chili Garlic Sauce. Cook an additional 15 minutes over medium heat. Serve hot.

Note:
This chili is VERY spicy. The serrano peppers range from 10,000 – 23,000 Scoville units. This is a great deal hotter than the measly jalepeño, which ranks in at 2500 – 5000 Scoville units. The real kicker is the Huy Fong sauce – made with a variety of peppers and spices.

Preheat oven to 350°. Combine bananas, sugar, vanilla extract and eggs in a large bowl and beat w/ a mixer until well blended. In another bowl, combine flour, salt, and baking soda and stir. Add flour mixture to banana mixture and beat well. Spoon batter into a 9×5 non-stick loaf pan and bake for 45 minutes, or until a wooden toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool for 15 minutes before removing from the pan.

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