This week, The Instance is finally joined by our friend Scott Kurtz. You can find Scott Kurtz’s PVP Online webcomic here, his Twitter feed here, and a picture of a duck here.
Big News Of The Week
The Lunar Festival Comes But Once A Year
Every year, the druids of Moonglade hold a celebration of their city’s great triumph over an ancient evil. During the Lunar Festival, citizens of Azeroth have the opportunity to honor their elders, share magnificent feasts, dress up in beautiful garments – and for the first time, earn achievements specifically created for the holiday. This event began on Saturday, January 24, and lasts long enough for us to pick it apart.
Rumors And Scuttlebutt
Warhammer To Come Out With Live Expansion
According to an interview Massively.com has with Mythic executive producer Jeff Hickman, Warhammer Online will receive a series of patches over the next few months that they don’t want to call “patches”, per se. Hickman would like to call them a “live expansion”. In the hopes of distancing themselves from all the online games out there that “patch” their product, Mythic has once again blatantly branded something mundane as though it is truly original.
Guess Who’s Coming To DPS…er?
Blizzard CM Ghostcrawler has been omnipresent on the official forums lately, and his latest post as we start to record is a good one. “As far as melee dps goes, we think rogues, cats and Arms warriors are all a little low. We haven’t announced specific changes yet but they are coming.”
First WoW Came For All Your Free Time
Now WoW is coming for your soul. A University of Colorado grad student named Theo Zijderveld decided to make it his master’s thesis that…well, let’s just let Theo speak for himself. “World Of Warcraft can be so absorbing that the physical becomes unimportant.” Zijderveld touched of a storm of discussion this week with his “Cyberpilgrims” paper, subtitled “The Construction Of Spiritual Identity In Cyberspace”. It’s 72 pages long, and focuses on World Of Warcraft, among other games, to make the case that our religion is, well, going to Azeroth.
Town Cryer
All calls this week. Next week, dozens of e-mails. Dozens, I tell you!
Drop Of The Week
Another Dimension Coming To The Armory
3DArmory.com hit the scene this week with a slick flash-based rendering of your character, WoW Armory style. This site says it’s in beta, but they could also safely call it alpha, but that doesn’t matter! They’re on Facebook, so you can take the 3D model of your character with her current gear right into Facebook, and more.
Additional show content provided by Mean Gene, Patrick from France, Darrell the Tipgiver, Steve “Buxley” Pietrowicz and the outstanding Instance Community.
Special thanks to DogHouse Systems, TypeFrag and Godaddy for sponsoring this episode.
Fun show, guys. But, please note that the word ‘banal’ is pronounced like ‘canal’…it does not rhyme with ‘anal’. Ever.
Let’s look it up!
I’ll refrain from looking up the word “ever” for you. Suffice to say, not “ever” is lower than 28 percent.
Just to clarify, the proto-drake mount you get for finishing all the events is a 310% mount, not a 280% like the other normal fast mounts.
Just listened to this episode and have a tip for everyone.
On the topic of a patch disc, Scott Kurtz mentioned mac users can just copy the World of Warcraft folder over.
This also works in Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7.
I play WoW on three different machines, desktop and two laptops. When I patch my desktop, I copy my directory over to a USB Harddrive that I keep as a backup, complete with the Interface Folder and everything to keep my addons.
Simply copy the entire WoW directory over to the other computer.
I usually then make a shortcut to the Launcher.exe on the desktop or quick launch bar.
Launch the game and log in. The only settings you will have to change are your video settings if you are at a different resolution.
WoW.exe adds the necessary registry entries automatically. (The registry entries only tell the downloader where the WoW folder is located.)
I have only installed WoW once in 4 years, on one computer.
(I learned this technique with Warcraft III, although with that one you have to copy some registry entries so that Battle.net will apply patches correctly, otherwise the updater complains that Warcraft III is not installed.)
Blizzard couldn’t make it any easier to backup WoW and run on other machines.
Hey guys,
This is in response to having the patches all on a cd, free or not. One thing that I do that works well when installing on a new computer etc is having either an external hard drive or usb flash drive. If you have either of those, you can copy the folder and paste it on the new computer. Make sure to delete the WTF folder before starting the game. I’ve done this multiple times and it works every time. The cheapest way to do this is to get a usb flash drive that is big enough to hold the wow folder. You can get an 8gb usb drive for under $20. If you want to have the ability to do this when they add more content, you can get a 32gb usb drive for under $50. Put that usb drive on your keychain and install wow on any computer you want!
I do apologize, sir. My comment was meant to be taken as humourous, not condemnatory.
As a non-American, this was not a pronunciation I was previously familiar with. Further perusal of your cited source also validates the use of the words ‘agin’, ‘highfalutin’, ‘purty’, and ‘you-all’, further emphasizing the futility of my pedantic effort.
Your thorough and convincing rebuttal of my objection will not, however, be enough to prevent me from giggling like a three year old girl should you persist. Ever.
(Making fustian posts also makes me giggle like a three year old girl. Sorry.)
Tom Merritt on today’s Buzz Out Loud (Show 906) commented that they applied an “embetterment patch and a server kiss” to their download servers. I immediately had to go get some kleenex as my monitor was then covered in Mountain Dew…
Go listen …
http://www.cnet.com/8301-11455_1-10158594-10.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=BuzzOutLoudBlog
Rofl, Druids. Listen to your calls :]
It was commented on the show that once you start the achievements for the World Events, it would take at least a year to get the proto-drake for completing all events. Beware of the achievement “Brew of the Year.” Hopefully, Blizzard will keep the npcs that sell all the listed brews for the achievement during the 2009 event. Otherwise this means it would take you one year from Brewfest 2009 (if you dont already belong to Brew of the Month Club).
Glad to see someone else mentioned that the seasonal achievement leads one to a mount with a travel speed of 310%. This is big considering that it is probably the easiest 310% mount to get, even if it does take a year.
I found it odd that your guest considered alliance quests pre-BC to be single minded and of poor quality since most people probably felt it was the horde quests that were given little attention back then. It is one of the reasons blizz worked as hard as they did to give the horde so much in good questing in BC (and to make sure they didn’t give alliance twice as many quests again). To be fair, I know he said he only went to 40, so he wouldn’t know that the grimtotem lines that he regards so well was just a copy of the dark iron situations, but just wanted to give my 2cents that playing alliance is far from single-minded in any matter, any more then playing horde is solely about thrall worship.
Macro Minute, Tip Giver guy was a little hard to follow with all the specific details of his macro tip. Does anyone have any info or links to the macro he spoke about in this episode?
Thanks for the help!
Keep up the great work on the show guys. The Instance isn’t just a great WoW podcast, it’s one of the best produced and fun podcasts out there.
OH and please ask Patrick to stop. Just stop with trying to be funny. That never works.