Keeping Up with WoW News:

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this here yet or not, but I’m currently on a brief hiatus from World of Warcraft. It’s something I try to do every once in a while in a vain attempt to maintain my sanity, and I wanted to devote my attention fully to Dungeon Siege.

But in the meanwhile, I’m keeping up with the latest happenings in WoW, and reporting on them seemed like a good excuse for a blog post.

Hints of the new raid:

A recent IGN interview with some of Blizzard’s developers has provided some hints about the Deathwing raid. It is said to take place in multiple environments, starting with Wyrmrest Temple, and include multiple encounters with Deathwing–with breaks for loot in between–including one that takes place on his back as he flies toward toward the Maelstrom, with players “trying to wrestle him to the ground, basically.”

This sounds amazingly awesome, and it’s one of those moments where I really regret not getting many chances to raid. Maybe the Raid Finder tool will help, but I rather doubt it will even allow players to queue for recently released raids, and even if it does, I also doubt the ability of PUGs to succeed in them.

Tier 13:

Blizzard has also started releasing previews of the tier 13 sets, starting with warlock and warrior.The warrior is obviously inspired by Deathwing. Oddly, it’s getting a lot of love on the official forums, which is odd when you consider every other piece of tier feedback I’ve seen from that community this expansion has been in the vain of “ZONMG WORST TEER EVAR YOU SUCK SO MUCH BLIZZ WHY YOU HATES MY CLASS?!?!!” I have seen a lot of “Colossal Chinplate” jokes, though.

The faceless one-inspired warlock set is garnering more mixed reviews. Some love it; some hate it. Myself, I think the colours are a little too bright for a warlock set, but I absolutely adore the tentacle face hood. It’s one of the few tier sets in the history of the game where I can genuinely say it freaks me out a little bit, and that’s high praise for a warlock set. It’s grotesque and truly terrifying.

Blizzard is paring these announcements with retrospective looks at all previous tiers for these classes. This has solidified my belief that warlocks are the most ridiculously spoiled class when it comes to awesome-looking tier sets. I’ve also realized that T10 was better than I gave it credit for at the time, and that the absolute fugliest gear in WoW’s history came from Ahn’qiraj.

We can only speculate what the next classes tiers will be. I’m still crossing my fingers for a twilight dragonflight-themed rogue set, personally. Please share any hopes/speculation you might have in the comments.

The mystery of the glowing guys:

One bizarre topic of conversation on the forums lately has been the mystery of glowing, kneeling, untargetable people (Players? NPCs?) appearing in Orgrimmar, often in formation, on a few isolated servers. A lot of theories surfaced to explain these. Some claimed it was an exploit involving the Vial of the Sands mount, deepstone oil, and a few other items, but the number of occurrences and the wide-spread nature of it made me doubt this. Some claimed it was a hack, but it didn’t seem malicious enough. If it were a hack, I’d have expected them to start spelling out SusanExpress.

My favourite theory is that it was a glitch from the High Prophet Barim fight in Lost City of the Tol’vir. The idea was the code would get crazy if one disconnected during the repentance phase (which makes your character kneel and glow) and make a copy of your character appear in Orgimmar. This would explain why Alliance characters were sometimes seen, but one flaw with the theory is that there were reports of glowing people in very out of date gear–Burning Crusade weapons or paladin T10, for instance–and it’s not likely they’d be wearing such things in a Cataclysm dungeon.

Blizzard says they’ve fixed the problem, so we may never know the truth, but it was fun speculation while it lasted.

Horde Stereotypes: Are They Really True?

I’m one of those rare people that plays both factions in World of Warcraft. Back in Wrath of the Lich King, I mainly played Horde. Since Cata’s come around, I’ve switched to focusing on Alliance–in large part because I have a nice guild over there–but I still play my Horde toons regularly, and I still enjoy the Horde’s more colourful nature.

I never liked the faction rivalry in the game, and it especially bugs me when people actually buy into it and legitimately hate the other side. It’s just a game, dude! It always amuses how each side claims the other is made up of children and immature idiots. It’s just ridiculous that an aesthetic decision based on personal taste would dictate the maturity level of players. Right?

Lately, even though I still find it an absurd idea, I’m starting to wonder if the Alliance might not be right after all. I’ve had nothing but bad luck with people on the Horde side.

I’m a guild-jumper. My first Horde guild was nice, but it was essentially three people–including myself. I eventually left in the hopes of finding a larger guild. The first one I got into was, simply put, disgusting. The guild channel made the Trade chat anal [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker] spam look highbrow by comparison. Furthermore, despite their billing themselves as casual, some of them were surprisingly elitist and would absolutely eviscerate you if you failed to live up to their high standards.

I wound up ragequitting that guild.

My Horde characters are currently split between two guilds, and I suspect I will eventually quit them. In both cases, the litmus test came when I mentioned my Alliance characters. In one case, someone mentioned he would “rather be dead than [slur for a homosexual] Alliance.” In the other, when I mentioned that half my Alliance guild is female, someone wondered how they had found their way out of the kitchen. Face, meet my good friend, palm.

I’m only staying in the first guild for its high level perks, and in the other because I’ve only been a member for a few days and I’m hoping they’re better than they seem (somehow I doubt it). I’m about ready to give up on guilds altogether on that faction, honestly.

And it’s not just my own guilds. The other day, I joined a Firelands trash run on my Blood Elf mage with a group that was mostly made up of one guild. Now, to amuse my nerdly heart, I created a few macros that make my mage /say incantations in Thalassian when he uses his cooldowns. For some reason, the group took offense to this and began yelling at me halfway through the run, telling me to shut up and pelting me with homophobic slurs.

And for the record, it’s not as if I was filling the chat log and interfering with raid communication. They weren’t even using chat–except to harass me. I think they must have been talking in their guild channel or Vent.

If they’d been polite about it or given a good reason, I’d have shut off the macros happily. But I will not “stfu.”

This run honestly damaged my faith in the human race. To see so much bile and hatred spewed towards someone because they occasionally use fantasy words in a fantasy game… It boggles the mind.

It doesn’t so much offend me that they insulted me. It offends me that such small-minded, hateful people exist in the first place.

And to cap it all off, my random Horde dungeon groups as of late have been filled with sniping, insults, and people treating each other horribly.

I can’t help but contrast this with my experiences on the Alliance side, where my Dungeon Finder groups are polite and pleasant more often than not, where I have a kind and supportive guild that doesn’t feel like it’s made up of disturbed 15 year-olds. That’s not to say I don’t encounter immature and occasionally disgusting people on the Alliance side, but it doesn’t seem to happen as often as on the Horde side–despite the fact that the Alliance vastly outnumbers the Horde on my server.

I still find it hard to believe one’s maturity and one’s choice of faction might be linked, but it’s hard to ignore the (circumstantial but strong) evidence before my eyes.

What do you think? Is the Horde really less mature? Or am I just spectacularly unlucky? If you have any tales of Horde people behaving like, well, people, please share them in the comments. I would love to have my faith in my Horde brethren restored.