pre-BC symptoms of fatigue

All over the forums on all servers you can read that players are tired before TBC. Be it because of xmas holidays and RL commitments, but most just seem to think "it's not worth raiding before TBC". Why is that? Only because of the easy loot from PvP atm? Or because the items will be worthless fast in the expansion? Why did people get tired of conquering the 40 ppl instances? I think it's a mix between the above reasons and that players now tend to take a break for the upcoming two or three weeks. With the new epic raid dungeon limit of 25 players, we'll most likely see a lot of existing communities to break down and new ones forming. For some mid-sized guilds this even enables them to do guild runs into those dungeons. I forsee a lots of changes coming up and with the "equal level" of gear through the upgrades again, it does not mean that we won't see some new top-raiding groups.

Even on Argent Dawn these symptoms take its toll. Looks like Suicidal Noobs ceased to raid 40 ppl content and lots of the members tried to fit in other existing communities. Seems many raid communities stopped raiding before TBC at all, resulting in many bored high-level raiders trying to organize BWL PURs or joining the C'Thun raiding project, a PUR of bored T2+ raiders trying to get C'Thun down before expansion comes. Although if you read this post, it seems it's not going without a bit of drama along the way.

Talking about the above raiding project, i had to grin when i saw one player including the info "Gender: female, Age: 28" in the sign up. Don't bother searching for it, the post was edited shortly after. Why is it that some players think this is vital information? This really reminded me of an article i read recently about the different types of female players and the problems that can occur. Read The E-Ho game (also read the comments, some pretty funny). And no, I'm not saying mentioned player is an E-Ho. :)

One other interesting thing i saw today: Wiimote as WoW controller! Probably right before christmas your TV ads show lots of Wii spots as well, look pretty funny tho i didn't try one yet. But apparently it's possible to use a program called WiinRemote (for Mac it's DarwiinRemote) to play WoW with your Wiimote, as can be seen in a video shown in the above blog entry. NO, you won't be able to swing your sword like in the commercials about Wii, but pretty funny nontheless.

click-click-click... Tonk

Yesterday i joined Impact for a raid into BWL. A nice bunch of people, i very much enjoyed the time. Nearly forgot to add that lucky me could snatch the Head of the Broodlord Lashlayer during the raid. Not sure if the rewards will be of much use in TBC, but i want to experience the nice scripted questlines... and heh, in TBC they will yield XP as well. =)
As was being expected after the recent patch, it turned into a stress test for updated mods and configurations. Personally i had to realize that with my new actionbar mod Bongos, there were no real cooldowns on my skills. Sometimes a skill would grey out (that's why i did not realize before) but in 95% of the time i could not distinguish if the skill was available. It was an interesting experience to go through BWL and just go after my "feeling" for when and which skill to use. For this mess, it went ok i think. *chuckles* This happened as i did download the mod with a direct link, while the main sites were down, and the author does not have a proper readme.txt included. He also offers OmniCC which fixes the problem and also adds a visible cooldown on eg. items i have in my bank - really nice.

One thing that stroke immediately as highly annoying was the "click-bug" that was introduced with the new patch. Basicly while in a raid you'll hear a clicking-noise every time someone joins/leaves the raid channel... drives you insane fast! To fix it either use the following macro or search the mod-sites for a tiny addon against it.. i saw 3-4 different ones.

/script if not _clickfixed then __xps=PlaySound; function PlaySound(snd) if (snd~="igCharacterInfoTab") then __xps(snd); end end _clickfixed=1; end

During the last days i also saw the first Hippogryph Hatchling. It's one of the special rewards from the WoW TCG. Looks quite funny. I also heard that with the last patch the idle animation from the Zergling was improved... have to look out for it.

I started to update my addon list on the right and clean it up or change broken links. As some of the addon websites still have trouble, it might take a few days until it's complete, but most links are updated already.

Apparently there is a gold dupe bug that surfaced first on the Mannoroth server. Blizzard tried to contain the damage and deleted a ton of posts and suspended many players. Rumours say a GM showed up on the bridge to AH and perma silenced and sleep every player who was talking about it. I'm not sure how exaggerated those reports are, but seems Blizzard did not handle it with the sensitive but the huge Ogre-Hammer. Although they did not set back the affected servers, which seems odd. Some more info on the EJ Forums.

A last tip for our engineers: Since the patch there is a new schematic for a Steam Tonk Controller available at the Darkmoon Fair. It will cost you 40 tickets. The controller itself is rather cheap to produce, has 50 charges and more important is BoE so you can hand it out to friends as well. From what i hear you can summon the tonks everywhere but in the large cities. So yes, also in raid instances. ;)