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WoW actively supports genocide and driving animals to extinction.

WoW actively supports genocide and driving animals to extinction.

• run LBRS/UBRS/Strat/Scholo/MC over and over and over (and over and over) until you get whatever item set interests you most
• play enough time to buy the materials to make your own purple equipment
• play enough time to buy an epic mount
• collect insane amounts of dark iron ore and other things, so that eventually one of your reputation bars can turn the color you want
• ... anything else people do at level 60. EVERYTHING at level 60 is significantly harder to get than anything at level 59, because Blizzard wants to give people something to do once experience is no longer worth anything

• run LBRS/UBRS/Strat/Scholo/MC over and over and over (and over and over) until you get whatever item set interests you most
• play enough time to buy the materials to make your own purple equipment
• play enough time to buy an epic mount
• collect insane amounts of dark iron ore and other things, so that eventually one of your reputation bars can turn the color you want
• ... anything else people do at level 60. EVERYTHING at level 60 is significantly harder to get than anything at level 59, because Blizzard wants to give people something to do once experience is no longer worth anything

There's a difference in end-game content, yes, but it's a bonus, not a detriment. Epic Item sets could take a year of play to get. Even for items that you can craft yourself, there are items that could take quite a lot of time to gather materials for (bottomless bag, any of the purple stuff).

It's a bonus because if you want to play shorter/quicker stuff, you can create an alt character, and go through some of the lower instances more often, playing them from a different role.

It's true that the easiest way for Blizzard to add long-lasting gameplay is to simply make the end items insanely difficult to get. But eventually you're going to move on to another MMORPG sooner or later, and if the current situation annoys/bores you enough, maybe it should be sooner.

There's a difference in end-game content, yes, but it's a bonus, not a detriment. Epic Item sets could take a year of play to get. Even for items that you can craft yourself, there are items that could take quite a lot of time to gather materials for (bottomless bag, any of the purple stuff).

It's a bonus because if you want to play shorter/quicker stuff, you can create an alt character, and go through some of the lower instances more often, playing them from a different role.

It's true that the easiest way for Blizzard to add long-lasting gameplay is to simply make the end items insanely difficult to get. But eventually you're going to move on to another MMORPG sooner or later, and if the current situation annoys/bores you enough, maybe it should be sooner.

There's a difference in end-game content, yes, but it's a bonus, not a detriment. Epic Item sets could take a year of play to get. Even for items that you can craft yourself, there are items that could take quite a lot of time to gather materials for (bottomless bag, any of the purple stuff).

It's a bonus because if you want to play shorter/quicker stuff, you can create an alt character, and go through some of the lower instances more often, playing them from a different role.

It's true that the easiest way for Blizzard to add long-lasting gameplay is to simply make the end items insanely difficult to get. But eventually you're going to move on to another MMORPG sooner or later, and if the current situation annoys/bores you enough, maybe it should be sooner.

Can you trade items or money in Battlegrounds? If so, that would be a huge reason not to allow cross-server BG (as it would make gold farmer's job easier (they wouldn't have to make sure to farm gold on every single little server, and it would definitely help the money-laundering phase of gold farming), and it would increase the impact of dup bugs, if any). Though obviously they could disable trading in BG's to make it easier to span universes.

"light-cone" FINALLY! i've been looking for something to go with my cone of cold! mages rejoice!
/dance

Does Blizzard ever plan on adding some sort of on site Item Database like Thottbot/Allakhazam/WarCry

Thottbot would be one of the largest WoW third party sites out there, but being owned by a disreputable company like IGE can't be good for the community. Even endorsing one of the third party sites that isn't run by pedophiles might be a step forward. :)

If you look at this Thottbot entry it appears to be from some other game.

They do say that one sign of MMORPG addiction is if you get far too emotionally involved in the ups and downs of the game.

"A few more stamina points on your boots isn't going to mean a whole lot when a party of 5 orcs flanks you in a well executed pincer move."

It's not "a few". If you do not do instances and just survive on the greens, you will be around 100 attribute points behind (or resistance, or special ability). Just compare set items from the instances to "of the bear" or "of the monkey" stuff that you can find.

Actually, I'll grab a couple real quick:

green - http://www.thottbot.com/?i=5355
blue - http://www.thottbot.com/?i=20124

Your green is (at best) +17 str & stm. That's 34 attr.

Your blue is 48 atr (19 & 20 stm, 9 spi) and +10 frost resist. It's also 617 armor vs 570.

Now, do this for every piece of equipment on a person. Head, kneck, shoulders, chest, legs, hands, feet, belt, bracer, ring, ring, trinket, trinket, weapon, off-hand. If someone plays religiously, they will build up an enormous advantage in not only attribute points, but minor special powers and resistances as well.

Finally, note I only used a blue vs green. The reality will be purple or better (or blue set items, which is roughly purple anyways), vs green and random blue sellable drops.

-Jeff

P.S. I grant that tactics can and do make a difference, but equipment is vastly more important than you indicated.

"A few more stamina points on your boots isn't going to mean a whole lot when a party of 5 orcs flanks you in a well executed pincer move."

It's not "a few". If you do not do instances and just survive on the greens, you will be around 100 attribute points behind (or resistance, or special ability). Just compare set items from the instances to "of the bear" or "of the monkey" stuff that you can find.

Actually, I'll grab a couple real quick:

green - http://www.thottbot.com/?i=5355
blue - http://www.thottbot.com/?i=20124

Your green is (at best) +17 str & stm. That's 34 attr.

Your blue is 48 atr (19 & 20 stm, 9 spi) and +10 frost resist. It's also 617 armor vs 570.

Now, do this for every piece of equipment on a person. Head, kneck, shoulders, chest, legs, hands, feet, belt, bracer, ring, ring, trinket, trinket, weapon, off-hand. If someone plays religiously, they will build up an enormous advantage in not only attribute points, but minor special powers and resistances as well.

Finally, note I only used a blue vs green. The reality will be purple or better (or blue set items, which is roughly purple anyways), vs green and random blue sellable drops.

-Jeff

P.S. I grant that tactics can and do make a difference, but equipment is vastly more important than you indicated.

Everyone knows that NuBus cards work better when they're covered in human blood.

The whole system would run faster if you painted a pentagram in your blood inside the cover of the system before you closed it up. This is the little known bloodrage technique for overclocking.

Thottbot is a very useful web site containing data about in-game items, quests, monsters, classes, player profiles, skills, etc. in World of Warcraft.

How did they get this data? One of the more popular add-ons for World of Warcraft is called Cosmos. One of the many features of Cosmos is a plugin to Thottbot so that information that your player sees gets uploaded to Thottbot to improve Thottbot's data - if you see monster X at coordinates Y,Z and no one else has, Thottbot now knows that monster X can potentially be there, and what items you can get from killing it.

IGE is a well known online currency and item broker, and many people within the World of Warcraft community are concerned that once IGE and the so-called "Asian Farmers" get a large presence that the in-game economy will be permanently ruined - better equipment for your character will be out of your price range unless you go to an in-game gold broker, paying real money for game money. World of Warcraft is the only MMORPG I've had experience with, but I've heard that activities like this have made some MMORPGs unplayable.

Most people assume that the Thottbot service was benign, but with the news that IGE owns it is somewhat alarming to people. This means that IGE now has information on what a large portion of the characters in game have and get their items and money, which could be used to more effectively farm high-demand items, collect in-game money at a higher rate, etc.

I don't neccessarily see this as the end of the world, but it is a bit of a concern. I'll probably stop using the Cosmos UI enhancements, or at the very least disable the Thottbot data aggregation.

Interesting note, Blizzard removed timing features from the language to prevent automated tasks. CosmoUI had one feature as a work around, but asked to remove it.

Stops that auto farming sitting in a field, like the fishing bots did. I wish I knew how the fishing bots worked, as you had to click a moving icon.

There are also 2 other UI Mods that are popular CTMod and Gypsy Mod

The XML language has made it easy for people to upload thier characters to websites like Allakhazam and Thottbot. Very nice gaming resources for WOW.

Reminds me of the days Tribes scripting took off, made many people into full time programers. Glad to see it in newer games, actually promoted by the game developers.

Good job Blizzard.

http://www.thottbot.com/ is a great site for items, quests, skills and player profiles. Autoupdates from information collected by players too.

(I have nothing to do with this site, I just use it and find it incredibly useful)

By the way, community-run guides usually do much better over the long term than paper guides anyways.

For those interested it looks like Blizzard has also brought the World of Warcraft world to the pen and paper set, for those old-schoolers out there.

www.thottbot.com

Contains an easy to access item, character, skills, spells, mobs, and quests database.

I'm not sure how much use a "Guild webpage" would get that could not be easily gotten elsewhere. But hey, if you must have, you must.