CM Zarhym announced that players with characters in select accounts will be credited with 24 hours of extra playtime for the downtime experienced from November 23 to November 25. He said the credit process should be complete within the next few days. I guess this means as long as you have even a level character on any of the realms listed, you’ll get credit. I see at least two realms where I have low level characters so I guess I’ll get the one day credit.

Below is the list of US realms that have been credited with play time:

Antonidas

Anub’arak

Blackwater Raiders

Bladefist

Borean Tundra

Cairne

Cenarion Circle

Cenarius

Darrowmere

Drak’Tharon

Drenden

Echo Isles

Farstriders

Fenris

Garrosh

Hydraxis

Hyjal

Korialstraaz

Lightbringer

Maiev

Misha

Mok’Nathal

Moon Guard

Nazgrel

Nesingwary

Nordrassil

Quel’dorei

Ravenholdt

Rivendare

Shandris

Shu’halo

Sisters of Elune

The Forgotten Coast

Tortheldrin

Uther

Vashj

Winterhoof

Wyrmrest Accord

Post from: WOW Obsessed

It’s a great thing that Blizzard is reaching out to the Facebook and Twitter communities since it’s a great way to spread information about the games and any important events and promos related to them. It’s also a great way for fans to interact outside more conventional media like forums. Whether it’s talking about new updates, game tips, strategies, or talking about your favorite game topics or simply just hanging out, this is a nice way to do it.

You can see the various Facebook fan pages here:

Blizzard Entertainment http://www.facebook.com/Blizzard

Warcraft http://www.facebook.com/Warcraft

Diablo http://www.facebook.com/Diablo

Starcraft http://www.facebook.com/StarCraft

Post from: WOW Obsessed

CM Zarhym also warns about resellers who are using this opportunity to get the game cheap and sell it to other people even possibly at full price. He warns that these resold copies might already be used and have an invalid authentication key. To be safe he recommends that eveyone purchase it through the Blizzard store.

Thanksgiving may be over but the weekend is not so I wish all you a great weekend!

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Well it wasn’t really Blizzard but it’s someone high up enough to give this statement a bit more “oomph”. Blizzard’s VP for Game Design and WoW mastermind Rob Pardo recently had an interview with Warcry.com on his view about the 5 years of WoW. It was here that he talked more about how the game has been evolving from a more hardcore game to a more casual friendly game where more players can see the content they come up with. He explains that this was because a lot of designers including himself came from being hardcore gamers in other MMO’s like Everquest and it was this hardcore gamer in them that made them think that’s how things should be. But as we know they’re learned that it didn’t have to be that way to make the game fun.

Anyway, it was in that interview where Mr. Pardo said it outright that the Arena Tournament was a mistake. To clarify, he mentioned that when they thought it up before they never expected how much it problems it would cause in terms of balancing classes especially when taking both PvE and PvP into consideration. These his words:

We didn’t engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There’s constant pressure on the class balance team, there’s pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don’t PvP don’t understand why their classes are changing. I don’t think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we’d have to do to balance it in that direction. source

Mr. Pardo even said that if he could go back in time, either he would go back to before the game came out and changed the rules to make the Arena easier to implement or he would just scrap the idea. Of course they can’t scrap the Arena Tournament now so we just have to live with it, taking the good with the bad. Right now I’m just have this happy feeling that what I was thinking all this time ever since it came out was right all along.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

I would just like to remind everyone that Blizzard said that we have until November 11 before players will be required to merge their WoW account with a Battle.net account and not doing so will prevent them from being able to log in. It’s November 10 so we have one day until this goes down. For US players you can go here to convert your account and here for EU players. I would also like to remind everyone that existing accounts that merge after November 11 will still get the Mr. Chilly pet but hurry up since they’ll only be offering it for a certain amount of time.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

The Blizzard Pet Store is a new way for players to get new non combat pets using means that’s not within the game. Some players might not care for collecting non-combat pets in the game but for those who are, this is a great way to beef up your collection if you’re willing to pay the price. Currently the Pet Store has two unique and cool pets, the Pandaren Monk and Lil K.T. The Pandaren Monk is a martial arts expert (he even makes those Bruce Lee like sounds hehe) of the Pandaren race, the for fun Panda-like race that Blizzard announced for an April Fools joke a few years back. Lil K.T. is a mini version of the lich Kel’thuzad who lords over Naxxramas. He even kills critters and has a diabolical laugh. One thing about the Pandaren Monk is that from now until December 31, 2009 every Pandaren Monk purchase will have 50% of the proceeds from the purchase will be donated to charity. Both the Pandaren Monk and Lil K.T. costs $10

Blizzard intends to add more pets to the store in the future so it’s definitively something every pet collector should look out for. Also, according to the Pet Store FAQ they have no plans to remove the pets from their “shelves” so the Pandern monk and Lil K.T. are here to stay! You can see the Pet Store FAQ here.

Happy pet collecting!

Post from: WOW Obsessed

It actually didn’t take much thinking that a race change service would make sense especially after Blizzard allowed faction switching. Switching factions is more of a leap than switching races within the same faction. In a way race switching was possible even before but it involved switching factions then paying for another one later on when the service is available again but this time choosing a different race like going from an Undead warlock to a Human Warlock then an Orc Warlock. That being said, I was actually a bit surprised that this service actually came out before patch 3.3’s release.

Basically the mechanics of the race change service has similarities to the faction transfer except that of course since you aren’t switching factions, a lot of things aren’t affected. The service costs $25 per transaction and is different and separate from a faction transfer so you cannot change factions using this service. Characters at least level 10 are eligible for this service, except for Death Knights who need to be level 60. This service also includes a name change and a re-customization as part of the package but this is purely optional. You can change your race every three days.

After purchasing a race change you’ll need to be logged out of the character involved for at least 30 minutes. When the change has been completed, necessary reputations will be changed accordingly but things like achievements, honor points, arena points, mounts, titles, non combat pets and such similar things will not be affected by this process.

Click here to see the complete Race Change FAQ.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

battlegrounds battlemasters

Blizzard didn’t forget about twinks when they released the feature to gain experience from Battlrgrounds, They did provide a feature that allowed players to turn off their experience gain so that twinks can not only PvP without the fear of leveling past their bracket but also play against their fellow twinks in their battlegroup. This is also to prevent casual players who are doing battlegrounds for fun as they level up from getting stomped over and over by the twinks. This whole thing has caused a bit of a problem though.

Keeping the twinks together and away from the casual guys is a great idea in theory. The problem is that, in certain battlegroups there don’t seem to be enough twinks. Many players have reported that they often have to spend so much time queuing up for the xp-off games. This just proves that twinking isn’t equally popular across all battlegroups. Blue poster Crygil acknowledged that they are aware of this problem and that they are watching this closely. They’re working on a solution to this that won’t affect players who aren’t interested in this practice. The only solution I can see right now is to pool all the twinks into one battlegroup but unfortunately CM Zarhym said that massive technical limitations prevents them from doing this.

Well just have to see what solution they have for this issue but I don’t expect that this is anywhere near the top of their list since twinking still isn’t something they endorse but just allow.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Gates of Uldum

So you might be wondering what will happen if you just happen to log your character off right in the spot where say the river of lava runs right through right before the expansion goes live? The thought of logging into an update that will threaten to kill your character sounds a bit cool but if you actually die that mind not sound cool at all. I’m thinking like logging off right in front of the Uldum gate and when you get back on, you’ll get punted by some huge elite monster!

Well Blue poster Wryxian assures us that Blizzard will keep such occasions in mind so that players will not be harmed in anyway in cases like this. There’s still no clear answer but it’s pretty certain that getting ported to your hearth location or at least somewhere else that’s safe is an obvious answer.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Twitter warcraft page

With World of Warcraft falling into the Warcraft category, the Warcraft Twitter page is sure to have some great stuff concerning our favorite MMO. So go ahead and follow it already. Make sure to follow the other two pages too if you’re interested. These pages are places you can go to to get news about the game, contests, events and more.

Below are the links to the Twitter pages along with some accompanying text taken form their announcemnt at the WoW forums.

@Warcraft -http://twitter.com/warcraft

Let out your #BattleCry to show your allegiance to Horde or Alliance in preparation for BlizzCon! Win Horde and Alliance prize packages while showing off your pictures during the ongoing battle across Twitter!

@StarCraft -http://twitter.com/starcraft

Are you the biggest #SC2fan? If you are, you will have a chance at 500 StarCraft II beta keys we’re giving away in this challenge.

@Diablo -http://twitter.com/diablo

Have you always wanted to have an item in a game that you’ve named? Enter the #d3unique contest with your best item name and you could win the grand prize of seeing your item wielded by Diablo III players worldwide.

Post from: WOW Obsessed