On a whim I decided to take a look at who, well not "who" but from where, people are reading this blog of mine.
In the past, it was clear that the only person who ever accessed this blog was probably me. Since this happens out of necessity when I create, proofread, and edit/update entries in it, this did not bring my ego a huge amount of gratification.
However, this time I noticed that one person or agent each from India, South Korea, Australia, France, and the Netherlands has looked at it; a small but maybe no longer "zero population" audience.
My own nascent ego boost aside, there seems to be substantial grounds for someone else to be proud — though it likely comes as no surprise to them — is Google Chrome.
One third of my readers were using Chrome with about one-sixth each using one of the others: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, or Safari. So based on this incredibly small, narrow sampling, Chrome seems to have way more usage than I expected; at least, under this subject it does.
The identification of the brand of operating system statistically being used was a surprise too. While Microsoft Windows enjoyed 2/3 of the visits, 1/6 each were enjoyed by Macintosh & Linux.
This is a big turnaround from half a dozen years ago when people and businesses were just "presumed" to be using Internet Explorer and running Microsoft Windows.
The World Wide Web was always supposed to be enjoyed from a multitude of different platforms and not just brands but kinds of web browsers. They do not just refer to the latter as "user agents" in all of the technical literature for the pointless sake of vagueness; versatility and diversity has been a goal of web architects and designers for decades.
So there are pleasant conclusions, or at least hypothesis to be drawn from looking at who and what sees my blog.
Now, if I could just get them to do it twice!
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Limited Indulgences for Off-realm Alts — With Caveats
For a fee, Blizzard will transfer your character to another realm. This includes its identity, its gear and other items, and its gold.
Two interesting things resulted from this; addons which had been around and working most of the time for years abruptly broke [and remain significantly broken] and a new, inherently limited way to move gold from one realm to another appeared. [In effect, at the expense of a new technological worm to deal with you get a new economic wormhole to use.]
You are limited in how much you can transfer a given character to a different realm by a limit imposed on how often a character can be transferred. Essentially, there is a "cool down" on this action imposed by the service itself, which is a for-pay service.
Going back for an even longer time, you could volunteer to transfer a character of yours, and its Azerothian belongings, to another realm. This service was and still is actually free. It was a limited, one-way trip with a limited choice of destinations for a limited number of characters; specifically, those on overcrowded realms that were keen to the idea of moving to what are underpopulated realms. Blizzard traditionally offered this service in realms a few brief periods a year; definitely not all the time.
With Battle Pets, Blizzard introduced a nice new feature for doing pet battles. As a reasonable convenience they allow/make all characters in an account share the same Battle Pets.
Now, because duplicates exist by dint of substantial players efforts and expenses on their multiple characters prior to this "sharing" feature — and perhaps other reasons as well — Blizzard made most vendor bought and quest reward Battle Pets sellable. One can use the Trade window, Mail window, or Auction window to give/sell/exchange pets in game.
At least in theory, you can. In practice, huge numbers of players use addons. Addons were written with a reasonable assumption that the way items were represented in the game API (application programming interface) would not change greatly. There was one consistent way that all items were represented so this seemed like a natural assumption.
But the assumption stopped holding as true a couple of months ago when Battle Pets came out.
Battle Pets that are ejected from the Pet Journal, a new feature of the game, always come out as an identical-looking item; one named a "Pet Cage". There is just one item type ID for it. So in terms of the existent APIs, in theory, they could continue working even with the new pets.
In practice, they seem to have problems and throw exceptions during bulk processing (e.g. auction house "scans") and during simple UI event processing such has handling "mouse over" events.
That is not to say that some work has not been done all over a bunch of addons to handle this. However, a surprising number of addons still are fundamentally broken in their primary purpose where ever they are forced to look at Battle Pet "Pet Cage" items.
What they need to do is look beyond the name of the item and even its over type ID and check out the extra details hidden in the item hyperlink that has a new format peculiar to Pet Cages.
Anyway, despite this hiccup in the extremely relevant domain of WoW addons becoming somewhat dysfunctional when Battle Pet items are involved in activities — particularly Auction House enhancement addons, you can now sell your pets across realms. You can, that is, with one constraint.
Someone has to be willing to buy them. You also have to be willing to sell the pet for a price that people are willing to pay in that faction on that realm.
If you or they are not, and you retain more of that particular type of pet in your Pet Journal, then you are pretty much stuck with that Pet Cage as an item which needs to sit in a bank or bag slot until a mutually-agreeable price can be hit upon "someday".
There just is not a lot of such storage space available in WoW except by creating additional characters to use as "banker" alts. The problem there is that you need to earn or stumble upon the [possibly gold-fueled] cooperation of other players to found a guild with that character, or do without a guild bank's worth of slots at its disposal.
So the bright news for longtime players of WoW is that you now have this third way to transfer gold from one realm to another. Taking a step back to regard this new feature objectively, one finds it still has limitations
What is my advice to players who have been playing WoW for a really long time, have a bevy of redundant Battle Pets which they would like to replace with a greater number of unique Battle Pets. and have alts on other realms which are in need of gold?
Study how markets work in the real world in terms of the well known law of "supply & demand"; something you probably already know about. But more importantly, go read up on and think about "arbitrage". It is a way of buying low and selling high, typically across geographic domains [in this case realms] as a way of taking advantage of different market prices on specific items or most items in general.
Ultimately, it would be nice if WoW addons made it possible to quickly look at lists of your WoW Battle Pets and find which pets you have duplicates of, particularly in most cases Level 1 ones, and see what the going successful auction sale prices are on other realms for that specific Battle Pet type.
In the meantime, however, it would just be really nice if all the Auction House addons simply got fully working with Battle Pets instead of generating errors when operating on them.
Once that happens, I see great opportunities despite some inherent and overall benign limitations on a new way to flow your own gold from one realm to another!
So, despite the devils in the details at the moment, there is an exciting new way to transfer some of your gold from one realm to another.
Two interesting things resulted from this; addons which had been around and working most of the time for years abruptly broke [and remain significantly broken] and a new, inherently limited way to move gold from one realm to another appeared. [In effect, at the expense of a new technological worm to deal with you get a new economic wormhole to use.]
You are limited in how much you can transfer a given character to a different realm by a limit imposed on how often a character can be transferred. Essentially, there is a "cool down" on this action imposed by the service itself, which is a for-pay service.
Going back for an even longer time, you could volunteer to transfer a character of yours, and its Azerothian belongings, to another realm. This service was and still is actually free. It was a limited, one-way trip with a limited choice of destinations for a limited number of characters; specifically, those on overcrowded realms that were keen to the idea of moving to what are underpopulated realms. Blizzard traditionally offered this service in realms a few brief periods a year; definitely not all the time.
With Battle Pets, Blizzard introduced a nice new feature for doing pet battles. As a reasonable convenience they allow/make all characters in an account share the same Battle Pets.
Now, because duplicates exist by dint of substantial players efforts and expenses on their multiple characters prior to this "sharing" feature — and perhaps other reasons as well — Blizzard made most vendor bought and quest reward Battle Pets sellable. One can use the Trade window, Mail window, or Auction window to give/sell/exchange pets in game.
At least in theory, you can. In practice, huge numbers of players use addons. Addons were written with a reasonable assumption that the way items were represented in the game API (application programming interface) would not change greatly. There was one consistent way that all items were represented so this seemed like a natural assumption.
But the assumption stopped holding as true a couple of months ago when Battle Pets came out.
Battle Pets that are ejected from the Pet Journal, a new feature of the game, always come out as an identical-looking item; one named a "Pet Cage". There is just one item type ID for it. So in terms of the existent APIs, in theory, they could continue working even with the new pets.
In practice, they seem to have problems and throw exceptions during bulk processing (e.g. auction house "scans") and during simple UI event processing such has handling "mouse over" events.
That is not to say that some work has not been done all over a bunch of addons to handle this. However, a surprising number of addons still are fundamentally broken in their primary purpose where ever they are forced to look at Battle Pet "Pet Cage" items.
What they need to do is look beyond the name of the item and even its over type ID and check out the extra details hidden in the item hyperlink that has a new format peculiar to Pet Cages.
Anyway, despite this hiccup in the extremely relevant domain of WoW addons becoming somewhat dysfunctional when Battle Pet items are involved in activities — particularly Auction House enhancement addons, you can now sell your pets across realms. You can, that is, with one constraint.
Someone has to be willing to buy them. You also have to be willing to sell the pet for a price that people are willing to pay in that faction on that realm.
If you or they are not, and you retain more of that particular type of pet in your Pet Journal, then you are pretty much stuck with that Pet Cage as an item which needs to sit in a bank or bag slot until a mutually-agreeable price can be hit upon "someday".
There just is not a lot of such storage space available in WoW except by creating additional characters to use as "banker" alts. The problem there is that you need to earn or stumble upon the [possibly gold-fueled] cooperation of other players to found a guild with that character, or do without a guild bank's worth of slots at its disposal.
So the bright news for longtime players of WoW is that you now have this third way to transfer gold from one realm to another. Taking a step back to regard this new feature objectively, one finds it still has limitations
What is my advice to players who have been playing WoW for a really long time, have a bevy of redundant Battle Pets which they would like to replace with a greater number of unique Battle Pets. and have alts on other realms which are in need of gold?
Study how markets work in the real world in terms of the well known law of "supply & demand"; something you probably already know about. But more importantly, go read up on and think about "arbitrage". It is a way of buying low and selling high, typically across geographic domains [in this case realms] as a way of taking advantage of different market prices on specific items or most items in general.
Ultimately, it would be nice if WoW addons made it possible to quickly look at lists of your WoW Battle Pets and find which pets you have duplicates of, particularly in most cases Level 1 ones, and see what the going successful auction sale prices are on other realms for that specific Battle Pet type.
In the meantime, however, it would just be really nice if all the Auction House addons simply got fully working with Battle Pets instead of generating errors when operating on them.
Once that happens, I see great opportunities despite some inherent and overall benign limitations on a new way to flow your own gold from one realm to another!
So, despite the devils in the details at the moment, there is an exciting new way to transfer some of your gold from one realm to another.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Suffering Security Succotash — Google Chrome attacked via ads on Curse
I really do not have a huge problem with ads served up on web sites save for one problem. They are not secure.
Ads can do almost anything unless publisher/subscriber to the ad service/broker agree to content restrictions & enforce them — and browser makers design/code their web browsers correctly, along with OS vendors that the browsers run on.
Just like the sites we visit themselves, advertisers and ad brokering services need to make sure their entire computing rigamarole does not get compromised.
Sadly, things just do not work out like they are supposed to work out.
On November 1, 2012 Curse.com posted a security bulletin on their web site saying that they had been informed by Google of a JavaScript-injection attack upon Chrome browser users visiting the Curse.com web site.
This event highlights how important it is for web browser developers, advertisers & ad brokers, and web sites to all work together to make sure that malware does not get through.
Until they do this, you are much safer if you block ads in general. This incident shows that, security-wise, the advertising community is "just not there yet" in terms of adequate safety.
What happened in this case was a web advertisement company's computers got hacked, and their computers in turn performed a JavaScript-injection via its ads that were displaying on Curse.com.
If you trust other companies/people's computers too much, then pretty soon you will not be able to trust your own computer. This bad ad incident drives this point home very clearly.
There are ad-blocker extensions for the major web browsers and it is a good idea to use them. When the advertising agencies/clients discover a substantial portion of the intelligent public are blocking their ads, they will feel pressure to make themselves trustworthy. Right now, they are not trustworthy enough.
Ads can do almost anything unless publisher/subscriber to the ad service/broker agree to content restrictions & enforce them — and browser makers design/code their web browsers correctly, along with OS vendors that the browsers run on.
Just like the sites we visit themselves, advertisers and ad brokering services need to make sure their entire computing rigamarole does not get compromised.
Sadly, things just do not work out like they are supposed to work out.
On November 1, 2012 Curse.com posted a security bulletin on their web site saying that they had been informed by Google of a JavaScript-injection attack upon Chrome browser users visiting the Curse.com web site.
This event highlights how important it is for web browser developers, advertisers & ad brokers, and web sites to all work together to make sure that malware does not get through.
Until they do this, you are much safer if you block ads in general. This incident shows that, security-wise, the advertising community is "just not there yet" in terms of adequate safety.
What happened in this case was a web advertisement company's computers got hacked, and their computers in turn performed a JavaScript-injection via its ads that were displaying on Curse.com.
If you trust other companies/people's computers too much, then pretty soon you will not be able to trust your own computer. This bad ad incident drives this point home very clearly.
There are ad-blocker extensions for the major web browsers and it is a good idea to use them. When the advertising agencies/clients discover a substantial portion of the intelligent public are blocking their ads, they will feel pressure to make themselves trustworthy. Right now, they are not trustworthy enough.
Where to get your own level 11 Nether Faerie Dragon
Ever since Blizzard introduced pet battles and the associated 'battle pets', formerly called 'companions', there has been fairly strong interest in getting a bunch of these pets for two different reasons:
They look really cool!
They have different abilities and attributes and battle pets can really kick other battle pets's butts!
You can battle other players's battle pets for fun, or go up against a loner/duo/trio of these out in the wild.
There are a handful of very nice-looking battle pets in the game. Actually, as a credit to their very artistic designers and animators, they are all nice-looking. I should say there are some extremely nice looking battle pets.
Some of these also happen to be extremely potent fighters as well.
Most of the dragonkin battle pets fall into both categories.
Years ago, while out questing on a Horde character in Feralas, I got as what seemed at the time as a lucky drop, a Sprite Darter Hatchling companion. At the time, I think it was a quest reward.
Today, the creature is a world drop. So the odds of getting one now are vanishingly small. Saying it is rare is an understatement. It looks very cool; its hide a study in pastel blues and greens. If you want, read more about these Faerie Dragon creatures from the standpoint of the lore.
It was the first dragonkin battle pet I started leveling. They are quite powerful. You can cast a Moonfire spell which creates one of those 'weather' effects in the battle which lasts 9 rounds. This particular weather effect buffs magic to do more damage. For a dragonkin, that works out really well because they just happen to be stocked with magic abilities.
All this is very cruel to merely mention to you if you are a WoW player and you do not have any dragonkin battle pets yet. So I am going to tell you how to get your own dragonkin pet without spending real money in the Blizzard online store on the web or spending gold in the auction house either.
Fly to Feralas, at the closest flightmaster on the map to Dire Maul. You don't need to go into the instance but you do need to go into the courtyard. The easiest way to reach it is on a flying mount, if you have one. If you do not, then go in the main entrance to the ruins and enter the courtyard.
Inside the courtyard there will be a half dozen of these creatures up almost all the time! I think if you kill one another will take its place within several minutes or so.
One or two people battling them will probably never have to wait for more to spawn, so long as they actually fight each battle and do not forfeit because they do not like the quality of the one they are up against.
I think about 1/4 or 1/5 of the ones I fought were uncommon (green) quality. So far, I have not capture a rare (blue) one yet but I hope will.
Note that these Nether Faerie
These are a semi-transparent aqua-colored creature. If you walk through your capital with on summoned, flittering along beside you, I think you will get some "Where did you get that from?" queries from people who seriously want to know; at least in October 2012. After that, probably most people will know!
If you are really patient, you can capture a level 12 Spawn of Onyxia but be prepared to wait hours for them to appear.
The spot they appear in is in front of Onyxia's cave entrance (dozens of yards north of it) — or just to the left or right of it a couple dozen yard, and this is due east of Mudsprocket. Due east means straight to the right of Mudsprocket on your Dustwallow Marsh zone map.
You can get the Nether Faerie Drake so fast in the Dire Maul ruins in Feralas, I strongly urge you to start there, getting at least an uncommon (green) quality one before you leave that spot. If you just want it for looks and do not care about using it in battles, then you can at a minimum win a poor one your first fight.
Then, head over to Dustwallow Marsh from time to time until you can grab yourself a common (white) or uncommon (green) quality Spawn of Onyxia. You quite likely will not be able to get a better quality one than common the first time you go. It will take many trips, that is many spawnings, before you actually get a blue on.
Remember when you are doing pet battles to capture a particular kind, to use pets in your fight that are not too far above that pet's level in order to capture it. Otherwise, a spell can crit or triple proc and you will be looking at a dead — not captured — would-be pet. Believe me, this has happened to me before!
As you level your battle pets, keep at least a couple at about every 2-3 levels in the game. Someone remarked to me that they were just going to level a few of their pets. That may be a good strategy but sometimes capturing pets is faster because it is very possible then to jump a level this way, particularly at lower levels.
If you kill a rare (blue) quality Spawn of Onyxia in a battle because you got in with 2-3 pets that were really too high level to combat it without creaming it instead of capturing it, you will be sad.
When you are feeling really patient someday, you might want to truck back to Feralas and start killing Noxious Whelps. There is a dragonkin battle pet you can get off them but it has a very low drop rate; slightly less than 1/1000. Considering I only see them spawn about 8-10 at a time along 2/3 of the outer banks of the lake in northern Feralas, you are likely going to have to run "ring around the lake" over 100 times.
After about 4, I got bored and decided to move on to Dire Maul which was infinitely more gratifying.
If this post has whetted your appetite for creatures like this, take a look at the list of Dragon Whelps at WoW Companions.
Most people probably already know this but being able to use battle pets in fights requires you to pay 100 golds to the battle pet master trainer, like by the druid trainer in Stormwind or the flightmaster in Orgrimmar, and the character that pays it has to be at least level 5.
The good news is, once this fee is paid, all of your characters on all of your realms on both the Horde and the Alliance faction will be able to do battle pets.
Note if you want to find where a combat pet spawns on a map, take a look at its page on wowhead.com and if you are currently looking at its page on wowpedia.org then click the link on that page that takes you to its wowhead.com page. At the top of the WowHead page for each of them, there is a zone map with silver dots marking the location where the creature usually spawns. That is where you want to go — with a set of appropriate level pets in your three slots!
If you are serious or curious about battle pets, here are three web sites you must visit in order to pretty quickly become an expert.
These 3 sites are produced by people who are well known in the WoW community from other WoW web sites they have had at for a while, and some guest appearances on others' web sites and podcasts.
They look really cool!
They have different abilities and attributes and battle pets can really kick other battle pets's butts!
You can battle other players's battle pets for fun, or go up against a loner/duo/trio of these out in the wild.
There are a handful of very nice-looking battle pets in the game. Actually, as a credit to their very artistic designers and animators, they are all nice-looking. I should say there are some extremely nice looking battle pets.
Some of these also happen to be extremely potent fighters as well.
Most of the dragonkin battle pets fall into both categories.
Years ago, while out questing on a Horde character in Feralas, I got as what seemed at the time as a lucky drop, a Sprite Darter Hatchling companion. At the time, I think it was a quest reward.
Today, the creature is a world drop. So the odds of getting one now are vanishingly small. Saying it is rare is an understatement. It looks very cool; its hide a study in pastel blues and greens. If you want, read more about these Faerie Dragon creatures from the standpoint of the lore.
It was the first dragonkin battle pet I started leveling. They are quite powerful. You can cast a Moonfire spell which creates one of those 'weather' effects in the battle which lasts 9 rounds. This particular weather effect buffs magic to do more damage. For a dragonkin, that works out really well because they just happen to be stocked with magic abilities.
All this is very cruel to merely mention to you if you are a WoW player and you do not have any dragonkin battle pets yet. So I am going to tell you how to get your own dragonkin pet without spending real money in the Blizzard online store on the web or spending gold in the auction house either.
Fly to Feralas, at the closest flightmaster on the map to Dire Maul. You don't need to go into the instance but you do need to go into the courtyard. The easiest way to reach it is on a flying mount, if you have one. If you do not, then go in the main entrance to the ruins and enter the courtyard.
Inside the courtyard there will be a half dozen of these creatures up almost all the time! I think if you kill one another will take its place within several minutes or so.
One or two people battling them will probably never have to wait for more to spawn, so long as they actually fight each battle and do not forfeit because they do not like the quality of the one they are up against.
I think about 1/4 or 1/5 of the ones I fought were uncommon (green) quality. So far, I have not capture a rare (blue) one yet but I hope will.
Note that these Nether Faerie
These are a semi-transparent aqua-colored creature. If you walk through your capital with on summoned, flittering along beside you, I think you will get some "Where did you get that from?" queries from people who seriously want to know; at least in October 2012. After that, probably most people will know!
If you are really patient, you can capture a level 12 Spawn of Onyxia but be prepared to wait hours for them to appear.
The spot they appear in is in front of Onyxia's cave entrance (dozens of yards north of it) — or just to the left or right of it a couple dozen yard, and this is due east of Mudsprocket. Due east means straight to the right of Mudsprocket on your Dustwallow Marsh zone map.
You can get the Nether Faerie Drake so fast in the Dire Maul ruins in Feralas, I strongly urge you to start there, getting at least an uncommon (green) quality one before you leave that spot. If you just want it for looks and do not care about using it in battles, then you can at a minimum win a poor one your first fight.
Then, head over to Dustwallow Marsh from time to time until you can grab yourself a common (white) or uncommon (green) quality Spawn of Onyxia. You quite likely will not be able to get a better quality one than common the first time you go. It will take many trips, that is many spawnings, before you actually get a blue on.
Remember when you are doing pet battles to capture a particular kind, to use pets in your fight that are not too far above that pet's level in order to capture it. Otherwise, a spell can crit or triple proc and you will be looking at a dead — not captured — would-be pet. Believe me, this has happened to me before!
As you level your battle pets, keep at least a couple at about every 2-3 levels in the game. Someone remarked to me that they were just going to level a few of their pets. That may be a good strategy but sometimes capturing pets is faster because it is very possible then to jump a level this way, particularly at lower levels.
If you kill a rare (blue) quality Spawn of Onyxia in a battle because you got in with 2-3 pets that were really too high level to combat it without creaming it instead of capturing it, you will be sad.
When you are feeling really patient someday, you might want to truck back to Feralas and start killing Noxious Whelps. There is a dragonkin battle pet you can get off them but it has a very low drop rate; slightly less than 1/1000. Considering I only see them spawn about 8-10 at a time along 2/3 of the outer banks of the lake in northern Feralas, you are likely going to have to run "ring around the lake" over 100 times.
After about 4, I got bored and decided to move on to Dire Maul which was infinitely more gratifying.
If this post has whetted your appetite for creatures like this, take a look at the list of Dragon Whelps at WoW Companions.
Most people probably already know this but being able to use battle pets in fights requires you to pay 100 golds to the battle pet master trainer, like by the druid trainer in Stormwind or the flightmaster in Orgrimmar, and the character that pays it has to be at least level 5.
The good news is, once this fee is paid, all of your characters on all of your realms on both the Horde and the Alliance faction will be able to do battle pets.
Note if you want to find where a combat pet spawns on a map, take a look at its page on wowhead.com and if you are currently looking at its page on wowpedia.org then click the link on that page that takes you to its wowhead.com page. At the top of the WowHead page for each of them, there is a zone map with silver dots marking the location where the creature usually spawns. That is where you want to go — with a set of appropriate level pets in your three slots!
If you are serious or curious about battle pets, here are three web sites you must visit in order to pretty quickly become an expert.
- Alludra's Pets - she has had a pet blog and a pretty voice for a very long time
- Battle Pet Battles - very nice video podcast (vlog) by author of the Power Word: Gold vlog
- Warcraft Pets - terrific encyclopedia-style web site about battle pets; kind of a wiki meets beastiary (beastopedia?) by Eli who has been producing the most authoritative site about fishing in WoW for years
These 3 sites are produced by people who are well known in the WoW community from other WoW web sites they have had at for a while, and some guest appearances on others' web sites and podcasts.
Getting there faster
World of Warcraft has grown enormously over the years. Not only in terms of the number of users, which is on the order of ten million in recent years — way up from a million or so back when I joined — but in terms of the sheer amount of land and number of dungeons in the game.
So some changes are kind of inevitable in order to keep players playing. People will struggle along for weeks or perhaps months to reach the maximum character level and start to taste the end game content.
However, if it took a year or two to do that then the game would be a lot less popular — and that content a lot less used, let alone seen.
One of the things that has changed in World of Warcraft over the years is the speed at which you can get from one place to another. Not only that but the speed at which you get the ability to speed up your ability to get around has sped up as well.
With the Mists of Pandaria expansion set (and the accompanying WoW 5.x client program) Blizzard has taken some measures to expedite the speed at which people can not only level up but also move around. Some of these changes are pretty exciting.
The game of WoW has also increased its demands on computers to go faster too. The graphics are becoming more and more intense, even at the so called "low" quality graphics settings, which these days actually look pretty good.
If your computer is overheating, make sure if it is a desktop our tower, that it is not right up against the wall. If it is in a hutch then make sure there is adequate air flow in and out.
If you use a laptop then put it on a tray with some cooling grooves underneath it and never use it on a blanket, sofa, bed, carpet, or the like without such a tray. Obviously, the little "feet" numbs under the corners of a laptop computer will not be standing off if the material beneath them is a soft fabric. You want to make sure there is always room and air for your computer to "breathe". These things are running at upwards of three gigahertz these days! Three billion CPU clock cycles per second generates quite a lot of heat.
Competing games to WoW come and go. Most never come close to the number of subscribers that WoW has. Those that have garnered a lot of attention before and just after they came out gained a lot of interest and subscribers for a while. But they quickly gave out.
WoW makes everything in gaming go fast, apparently.
Funny how that works out.
So some changes are kind of inevitable in order to keep players playing. People will struggle along for weeks or perhaps months to reach the maximum character level and start to taste the end game content.
However, if it took a year or two to do that then the game would be a lot less popular — and that content a lot less used, let alone seen.
One of the things that has changed in World of Warcraft over the years is the speed at which you can get from one place to another. Not only that but the speed at which you get the ability to speed up your ability to get around has sped up as well.
With the Mists of Pandaria expansion set (and the accompanying WoW 5.x client program) Blizzard has taken some measures to expedite the speed at which people can not only level up but also move around. Some of these changes are pretty exciting.
- Druids can obtain a glyph from inscribers that lets them carry a rider while in druid travel form.
- Those who do one of the special offers to bring friends to the game get a mount that turns them into a passenger-carrying flying mount.
- Going from one character level to the next goes faster all the way up to level 85.
- Gaining guild XP goes extremely quickly. Daily & Holiday quests dole out 60,000 guild XP.
- With so many towns/inns in the game, doing the holiday quests (Hallows End, New Year, etc.) that send you to a slew of places to meet someone, collect something, or the like now offers the possibility of leveling your character and guild both very quickly.
The game of WoW has also increased its demands on computers to go faster too. The graphics are becoming more and more intense, even at the so called "low" quality graphics settings, which these days actually look pretty good.
If your computer is overheating, make sure if it is a desktop our tower, that it is not right up against the wall. If it is in a hutch then make sure there is adequate air flow in and out.
If you use a laptop then put it on a tray with some cooling grooves underneath it and never use it on a blanket, sofa, bed, carpet, or the like without such a tray. Obviously, the little "feet" numbs under the corners of a laptop computer will not be standing off if the material beneath them is a soft fabric. You want to make sure there is always room and air for your computer to "breathe". These things are running at upwards of three gigahertz these days! Three billion CPU clock cycles per second generates quite a lot of heat.
Competing games to WoW come and go. Most never come close to the number of subscribers that WoW has. Those that have garnered a lot of attention before and just after they came out gained a lot of interest and subscribers for a while. But they quickly gave out.
WoW makes everything in gaming go fast, apparently.
Funny how that works out.
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