Wait… It’s not!

The US forums are back with some of the news I anticipated below. Plus the patchnotes. Here the highlights:

Main stuff

– Numbers and punctuation will not be passed through chat communication to members of the opposing faction. OMGWTFBBQ!!!!!!111!!11
– The bridges in northern Stranglethorn Vale are now fixed so they will not dismount you when you ride across them.

Instances – Raid

– Dire Maul open. Level 55+. Player cap of 5.

– Two outdoor raid bosses. Azuregos, a monstrous blue dragon, has landed in Azshara, while Lord Kazzak the demon can be found in the Tainted Scar of the Blasted Lands.

– Meeting Stones (still no word on how they will work)

– Player caps to instances. All dungeons now have a cap on group size to limit the number of players that may enter the dungeon. It was necessary to add this cap as raiding these dungeons trivialized much of the content. Because of this change we can now look to adding better loot to them during future content patches.

– If you enter an instance in a group, and then leave that group, you will not be able to complete quest objectives until you rejoin the group.

– “Raid lockout” is fixed. If the leader of your raid group is saved in a different instance than you would otherwise go to, you are added to your leader’s instance.

– Added /raidinfo command showing remaining time on saved raid instances.

– Extended the decay time of boss corpses in dungeons.

– Lengthened the respawn time of many of the creatures in Ragefire Chasm, Gnomeregan, Uldaman, Razorfen Downs, Scholomance, and Stratholme.

– If more than one player ties a loot roll, a random player will receive the loot.

Interface

– More action bars.
– Chat bubbles.
– Shift click on a quest will show completition criteria under the minimap.
– The tooltip will show who in the same group has the same quest.
– An option has been added to display the time remaining on your buffs all the time.
– Targeting with the tab key has been fixed so hitting tab will acquire creatures in a cone up to 30 yards in front of you or a circle 10 yards around you. It no longer only hits targets off to your left.
– You can now lock your action bar so spells cannot be dragged out of it while it is locked.
– Added a right-click menu to the social pane for whispering and inviting players into groups.
– Increased the quest share distance to 10 yards.
– Added the “date” and “time” functions to the UI scripting system.
– The auction interface now displays the gold, silver, and copper values for all items, even if those values are zero. This should make it more difficult to “hide” an item that costs several gold among items that only cost several silver, for example.
– The /bug and /suggest commands have been removed from the game. (No, really?)

Minor stuff

– The Drunk effect has been greatly enhanced.
– Added /golfclap.
– Spells in PvP now have a slight increase in range and area of effect when targets are moving. This should improve the overall usability of spells and ranged attacks.
– Fixes to the behaviour of mobs with parries, blocks and dodges.
– Mounts now are Horde or Alliance restricted in the tooltip. We do not intend to allow Horde players to ride Alliance vendor-purchased mounts and vice versa.
– If a player is under the effects of mind control by another player, then reputation adjustments for killing creatures go to the controlling player.
– The loss of overall reputation when a player loses reputation at the higher tiers of a faction (Friendly, Honored, Revered, Exalted) has been substantially reduced.
– Ogres in Azeroth have undergone a visual upgrade.
– Fixed several places throughout the world where monsters and profession nodes were spawning underground, floating or inside of objects.
– This one is great: A new engineering recipe is available in Blackrock Depths for a repair robot. This robot acts as a repair vendor for 10 minutes and will repair and purchase items for normal cost. This will allow dungeon groups and raids to get items repaired and sold without returning to town.
– A few flight paths added, some tweaked to reduce the time of the flight.
– Creatures that are quickly respawning to repopulate an area will often wait a few seconds after they spawn before attacking players.

What happened to the 8-effects limit on the mobs? I remember it was flagged as one of the main issues to solve in the patch.
What happened to the boat between Menethil and Southshore?

The scene couldn’t be more boring. It’s from Saturday that I want to take various hours just to catch up with what’s happening in the blogosphere because I’ve still old stuff to comment and discussions to push forward (instead I played WoW full time and I’ll write an update to my “guide to instances” soon). Maybe today I’ll write more of the stuff noone wants to read.

In the meantime there’s “news” about World of Warcraft. But they appeared on the wrong (european) website while the american forums died again, so maybe you didn’t see them.

The first news is a preview from an upcoming instance, “Dire Maul“. It’s for level 55+, in Feralas and it will offer a different type of content. Or at least it’s what they state:

– Dire Maul consists of three separate wings ranging in difficulty from level 56 to 60.

– There are many ways to complete the quests located in Dire Maul, and the decisions a party makes along the way will directly influence the potential rewards.

– In recent years, rumors have surfaced of an ancient arena within Dire Maul’s courtyard where unique creatures were once fought for sport.

– Adventurers will find that the occupants of Dire Maul possess many rare and epic weapons, armors, and profession recipes never before seen on Azeroth.

I’m happy to see that if “more content” has to be, at least it will offer something different. I hope the game will keep going in this direction.

The second news is about two test servers entering the US realms:

Two new public test realms are being introduced in the U.S. to help us test future changes that are going into World of Warcraft. These realms will supplement the ongoing QA process already in place internally. We are deploying these test realms so that we can gather valuable feedback on various test issues in a closed environment without having these issues adversely affect our general audience.

No other details about them. I was hoping to see something different even on this aspect. At least incentives for the players to be helpful and a better relationship between devs and testers.

More specific news:

However, this initial testing phase requires characters between the levels of 55 and 60 in order to properly test the content and functionality for the next patch. Email invitations have been sent out to a random set of players who meet these qualifications. Their level 55 to 60 characters have been copied to the test realm and will be waiting for them when they log in for the first time.

I’m still only level 51. I guess I’m not enough catass :)

(This idea to write the news about the US on the european site and vice versa is really awesome. Keep going)

I’ve repeated various times on this site that Caydiem is doing her work as a community manager in a wonderful way. I really believe that nothing more could be done. Not only she deals with problems, rants, attacks and legitimate issues way better than the rest of the community guys working at Blizzard, but what she’s doing is head and shoulders above everything on the market. She is able to understand directly why the players are ranting about something, she demonstrated to know and understand this genre, she gave proof of being intelligent and, in particular, she doesn’t offend the players.

Too often the community managers love to lead the situation, answering what they want to answer, making fun of legitimate complaints, avoiding to tackle directly the most “inconvenient” issues that are brought up. It’s a cynic and sly way to use the communication for your own purposes. Because too often the “communication” is just seen as a method and theory to master so you can control and convince. Dismissing and suffocating the problems. Forgetting completely that what you have to FEAR isn’t the community, but just your own ignorance and proud ego. The ivory tower. “Hey, do you really believe I’m here to listen you?”

Again I also repeated various times my point of view on all this and I want to link again a comment of Jessica Mulligan to demonstrate that I’m not just a fool with no contact with the reality.

Now I quote here a recent message of Caydiem. What is important isn’t the informations that you may deduce, what is important is the tone she uses. A type of respect that isn’t about “being polite” or “professional”. It’s instead sincere and direct. Understanding and admitting the faults and underlining the intention to address them. She doesn’t throw or dodge the critics, she doesn’t glide or hide. Instead she is interested into understanding the issues because it’s valuable. She doesn’t spit on the community as everyone else working on this genre. Noone excluded.

Well, the core problem is that we have not significantly patched in over two months. This would not be nearly as large a concern as it is now if patches were coming out in a regular and efficient manner.

Hotfixes take time to compile, test, and deploy, just as patches do. In addition, not everything can be fixed with a hotfix. If it requires any change to the client whatsoever, a change cannot be properly fixed with a hotfix and must instead be patched.

Instead of slapping a band-aid on the problem, hotfixing the biggest bugs that can be hotfixed at all, and hoping the clamor will cease, we are working on fixing the root problem. The fact of the matter is we need to bring game changes to you more quickly so you do not languish with these challenging problems. These issues are such a concern not only because they make the game more difficult and frustrating to play but because you’ve had to deal with them for a long period of time without seeing any considerable chunk of fixes brought in at all.

We realize that what has been happening with this lack of updates is unacceptable for our customers. The infamous content patch is on its way, and once it comes we are committed to patching more frequently. We will update the game regularly with fixes, balance changes, and new content. We will deliver more comprehensive patch notes than have been given in the past.

I know that these are just empty words to you right now and the proof is in the pudding. If I could hand you a patch today, I would. Sadly, I cannot do that. But we have been working on certain aspects of this process that should reveal themselves to you soon and affirm that we are indeed committed to delivering the service for which you pay.

Communication-wise we are going to respond to these issues as they come up, as we’ll have more information with this process. You should be better informed as far as what’s coming.

There have been a variety of issues holding back this patch that I cannot go into, but this is not the trend we want to set in updating the game. Our new process should bring you patches more quickly.

Just to explain better. These “praises” I’m writing don’t come from one message. It’s something I’m observing from when she started her work and I wanted to use this as an occasion to underline what I believe it’s good, in the same way I underline what is awful.

The problems at Blizzard are somewhere else. I believe they are doing a wonderful work with the communication. What doesn’t work is about something that Caydiem cannot solve. I’d like to see more direct involvement of the developers with the community. To start and participate in the discussions in a way that cannot be substitute with a community manager. So the problem goes deeper. It isn’t the communication alone. It’s instead the communication and its concrete consequences. Too often these “community managers” are supposed to fill roles that aren’t their responsibilities.

Again Caydiem does her best as you can see in every single answer she wrotes. I have a very good memory and a good spirit of observation. If I’m writing all this it’s because I’m sure of it. I’m sure that I won’t need to contradict myself.

I’m sure that I’ll never regret what I’m stating here.

EDIT: There’s a voice about Caydiem real name: Kristen De Meza. She was working for Horizon (ouch…).

The client is in the hands of the enemy

This is another update about the language barrier broken in World of Warcraft. It’s obvious to everyone that this rule is constantly exploited everywhere with the leet speak that isn’t properly masked. I also knew already that someone was able to build an UI mod to write and autotranslate stuff again by parsing leet speak. The limit was that both parts had to agree in the use of the mod or at least were good enough to read quickly that sort of crap.

What I didn’t know is that this language barrier can be completely wiped with a very simple hack to the client. You just need to open with a proper program the dbc.MPQ file, extract the “LanguageWords.dbc” file, remove its content, reintegrate it in the .MPQ file and save it.

Now, how can be Blizzard completely retarded? How they even IMAGINED about masking the language in the client instead that on the server?

Goons.

(Disclaimer: this hack is illegal. If you are a player and you plan to try it not only you are breaking the rules but you are also a loser. Exploiting a multiplayer game is an act of cowardice. No matter what. Play fair and have fun with what the game offers.)

One of the most abused (and tolerated by Blizzard) bugs-exploits in World of Warcraft may get fixed when the next patch will be out (see? My previsions suck. But I got the delay on the battlegrounds, so it was only half a failure):

The original poster is referring to an exploit that should be fixed in the next patch.

This is Tigole commenting the popular bug which allows the players to complete quests with raid groups when, instead, they are supposed to be restricted to one group only.

Concretely the exploit consists into disbanding quickly to get credit of the kill and get invited back into the group before the timeout that would kick the character directly out of the instance.

On FoH’s boards, as always, the best one line, sum up consideration:

In my opinion its frankly too late to put the genie back in the bottle.

This is also what they have to say about peoples that actually try to play the game “how it is supposed to”:

Everybody zergs these instances.

If you ask your guild if they wanna 5man this shit you get laughed at.

Another guy points out what really matters:

The whole concept is fucking dumb. If I have to kill some guy who the fuck cares how many people I bring with me. It’s a retarded rule and theyre fucking dumb for changing it 5 months later.

This comment is interesting because I discussed already the design implications here. The arguments are still valid.

(it was also discussed on Q23)

Now, maybe, they can move to enforce the communication barrier between the two factions exploited through leet speak? Or it’s about asking too much?

So look here.

*whimper of frustration*

I’ll answer their questions though:

– What games are you currently playing?
World of Warcraft and Eve-Online. Sometimes CS:Source. Offline Hearts of Iron 2.

– What are some of your favorite games of all time?
Many games on the Commodore 64 with which I grew up. Impossible Mission, Forbidden Forest (Nightmares!!), Neuromancer, The Bard’s Tale serie, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins (maybe an ancestor of WoW), Wasteland, Shamus Case II, Bruce Lee, Zaxxon and even Little Computer People, the “ancestor” of The Sims. Nearly all the games on the C64 are sticked in my head and left a trace inside me. So for me they all remain the best games, even if I know that playing them now wouldn’t give the same sensations. My young mind was able to add much more beauty and depth to those games that now seem so limited in the scope and I’m also sure that a part of them can be considered as brilliant, simple and effective game design even today. If I have to pick the more recent products I was caught in the love for Doom 2 (my first) and I liked a lot the first System Shock, Elite (First Encounter), the Ultima Underworld serie, Ultima 7 (all parts). I was also a japanese RPG whore for some time and I played everything translated in an understandable language on the Snes and PSX. So I loved Final Fantasy 3(6) and 9, Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, the Lunar serie and more. I’m also starting to like a lot Hearts of Iron 2 and I believe it would teach various things useful in mmorpgs. I would put here even what Derek Smart does if it didn’t suck badly on too many key elements (I love sandbox games).

– What are the first computer games you played?
Double Dragon and Dragon’s Lair as coin-ops. A text adventure game named “Atzech” (in english) and many, many others you don’t know in italian then Shamus Case II (best sound in a game ever, I still have nightmares about it) Attack of the Mutant Camels (Jeff Minter, Whohoo!), Zaxxon (Oh my god, I’m going to cry right now), Frogger and Hell Mazer. Oh, Ghostbuster was between my first games on the C64 too. Then I think I played 95% of all the existing games on it also thanks to an unstoppable piracy that was masked at that time (compilation of games were commercially sold in shops like bread in Italy. Each cassette or disk had like 10+ commercial games an noone was conscious of it like an act of piracy).

Which MMORPGs have you played and what levels did you characters reach?
I started with Ultima Online if I don’t consider MUD experiences. I mostly played one character that acquired its first GM skill one year and half after its creation (I should answer sincerely or you want me to show false catass power? Maybe I should go on Ebay to buy that.. Hmm..). After it I moved to DAoC and spent nine month to ding 50 with my infiltrator. Then I had to reroll because I hated to be marginalized in groups and I levelled to the max a cleric and a wizard. None of these ever reached Realm Rank 5 on PvP. I endured EQ only till level 15. I also played many other mmorpgs for “observing and studying” reasons but without dedicating a lot of time to them, so without achieving outstanding results. My current character in WoW is a warrior at level 49.

Impressive, huh? I’m a pure catass. Like Furor and Tigole. Hire me, KTNKS.

After my rant about the weak sneak peek from the upcoming patch in WoW, I got dragged in a discussion about the merits, demerits and expectations. The result is that I wrote my own list of things I’d like to see and that seem gone forgotten at Blizzard.

This list doesn’t beg for “more content” (in fact I believe that it may damage the game). It just groups those “usability” fixes and features that were asked back in beta but fell ignored. It’s a list of minor problem and glitches that should extremely easy and fast to solve, but still improving directly the experience of the game without requiring too much pondering.

What I want is:

– Leet speak blocked at the root
– Server transfers from the overcrowded servers
– Possibility to join the european realms and vice versa
– A fucking server-wide LFG system (it existed in beta)
– AH in all the major cities, linked together (and get rid of the lag in one step)
– Fixes to the raid instances
– Fixes to the resurrection in instances porting you in 0.0 space
– Fixes to the ships dropping you in the ocean
– Possibility to ride a mount ON BRIDGES. I hate STV.
– *ALL* the class issues KNOWN and CONFIRMED fixed. Not a timid line for each. There are devs sticky posts with consistent changes, where are they?
– Fire damage to lock characters in combat. So that peoples will finally STOP to sit on the fireplaces to annoy others
– Fixes to the faction system so that you don’t finish to get locked in situations where you have to kill 2345123455462345 mobs to gain status
– Fixes to the PvP exploits where peoples are able to cast spells from unreachable places and kill NPC guards unaffected
– Fixes to the broken polygons of the cloaks on the dwarf model
– New raid interface with the features explained in a sticky post
– Tweaks to the most awful flight paths
– Trees blocking the LOS of range weapons and spells. AT LEAST IN PVP
– The possibility to change the tabard without disbanding/reforming the whole guild
– A quest log to categorize and archive already completed quests
– Possibility to see the loot mode used by the group without being the group leader

And

– At least a PLAN for a weather system to launch in the next months

But really, if I have to pick just one, I WANT LEET SPEAK OUT OF THE GAME.

Most of the stuff I listed above is already confirmed. A good part is trivial to implement. I’d like to see some goddamn commitment to this game. Not useless fluff like ripping an user interface to brag about it as a new feature.

I do not think I’m asking the moon.

As expected, after I pasted this list, I got flamed and mocked: “So which things on HRose’s list would you like fixed? The “Leet Speek” problem? The developers don’t share enough of the internal bugs with us? The sound when people stand in fire? Or about the broken polygons on the dwarf’s cloak? These sound terribly important.”

So I had to justify myself and at least explain two of the most stupid points (fire damage and the dwarf cloak) to demonstrate that they aren’t that stupid. You are the judge.

CASE #1
The point of my list is that half is about announced stuff, half is about usability stuff that improves the games flat out with no side-effects (like the mounts on the bridges), and the rest is about stuff that would require less than 10 minutes to code and test.

The example of the fire is one of those things that are trivial to do:
– Peoples can sit on fires for HOURS because the fire does like 10/20 damage per hit. The regeneration rate for every character is ABOVE that value.

Now. The solution is about locking you in combat if you are taking damage. If you are locked you don’t regenerate health. This means that after three minutes sittin on a fire… YOU DIE!

What? It makes too much sense?

At the end what’s the point of EVEN APPLY fire damage in a game when it just does ZERO since the damage is pointless?

Same as for the communication barrier: OR you fix it properly OR you remove it altogether.

CASE #2
This is the example of “the broken polygons of the cloaks on the dwarf model” (it happens with ALL the cloak models):

Now, considering that this game is supposed to be played in third person, that’s what I see on screen for about 90% of the time. And it’s both ugly and annoying.

Even more annoying because this is a bug on the back of the model (a misplaced polygon) that happened with the patch in June. It worked perfectly before. Since June is there and noone cared to spend, how much? An HOUR? I really don’t know how much time it would take to move back the vertex that was bugged back to its original position.

I have another proof of this “bug” but only from a frontal view, comparing the old, discared (and way better) models with the new ones. As you see on the right part of the back, the new models have a sharp “edge”. That’s that exact misplaced edge that is causing the cloak texture to melt.

This can be consider MINOR as MINOR is the time to fix it. And still it’s on my screen 90% of the time. Excuse me.

—
This last graphic bug was also discussed long ago on this website.

Still arguing:
What you don’t understand is that my list was made to not ask for “content”. Instead it pointed out things to fix that aren’t “arguable”. You don’t need a design team to ponder the pros and cons because those are just inconsistencies and usability fixes.

They ARE “high priority” because their relevance is a balance between “how many users they affect” and “time required to fix”.

They aren’t “emergencies”, but even a small team is supposed to fix all that rather quickly.

The point is that we will be here IN A YEAR and, as an example, both the problem of the fire damage and the polygon of the cloak will STILL REMAIN UNSOLVED. Again, that was stuff that worked perfectly in beta, was broken, and noone cared to fix again. While it would take only an extremely limited time to fix, these things will keep piling up unsolved. How hard is to address them quickly, put the result on the pool of stuff that will be patched and FORGET altogether about them? Problem solved forever, you’ll never need to go back to work on that.

It’s this way that you are able to keep these large projects clean and organized, by starting to address all the small (but relevant and diffused) problems so that, once fixed, they do not crowd anymore the list of priorities.

If you take a single element from that list alone it doesn’t add much to the game. But if you take the whole list and patch it you’ll see the overall quality of the game rise with zero loss. And once done you’ll see the pool of problems start to drain way more quickly. This will directly help the team to control and focus even the most problematic issues.

Moral: The time it took me to write and explain each point on that list is more than the time a developer would spend to actually fix it.

Then, maybe, someone will wake up.

Someone on the boards reported another, rather relevant, exploit for the paladin class:

1- click divine favor

2- select a target and use holy light or flash of light on them

3- as soon as the light lands on them, press x to crouch

4- one second later, stand up (I do it by tapping w to move forward real quick)

5- your divine favor will still be up and you can get more critical heals for free…
It is very easy to land in 3 critical holy lights and if you are good you can land in a critical flash of light on top of that…all for NO mana…making other healers look like fools!

over 8000hp healing for no mana anyone?

Luckily we have a diligent player here, so she reported this directly to a GM. Here’s the result:

At first when I told this to the GM he said: the spell is working as intended thank you and bye…
I was like…wtf dude, the spell does NOT work as intended! please read!!!

At one point I even got threatened to be actioned for reporting this bug

If the same thing happened to me I’d have taken a screenshot with the proof of what the GM said. Start to exploit it savagely and spread the knowledge.

It’s about time that these companies *value* the help coming from the players. If they do not, they should be repaid with the same behaviour.

The removal of /bug and /suggest thanks you again. Still a great idea.

Till now it was possible to sort the servers by population. So you were able to see from the most crowded server till the most empty or vice versa.

Today Blizzard disabled even this. Now the servers are still divided into three groups (high, medium, low) but the servers in each group cannot be sorted anymore by population. So now it’s impossible to say which of the “high”-marked servers is the most crowded.

Just reporting. I hate these things, but I can see why they did it.

(I suspect that even the groups are broken, Froswolf is listed as “medium” and still has a queue. My server is “high” and no trace of one)