Infamous Sony new gaming console the Playstation 3 went on sale yesterday at exactly 00H Hour Zero-One and retarded brain damaged gamers camped out in front of retailers in hope to fell like a virgin again… or not, after all maybe most of them still are. But fuck it anyways I meant digitally virginized for the first time, or raped for a couple of hundred bucks but who cares, it is just a matter of opinion I guess, we live in a world of exuberant individual consumerism so who will notice that you spent 600$ (about 2 months of groceries for the average family of 3.5 members) on some stupid plastic junk.

All the fan boys will tell you that blah blah blah it is the greatest system of all time and that it is worth 600$ all we got for them as an answer is go fuck a goat and Smash My Ps3 Dot Fucking Com. (Fucking was added for dramatic effect only). Because yeah in case you were wondering the Ps3 already been terrorized by the same guy that brought you smash my Xbox/Xbox360/Ipod/Mom/Donald Pleasance and other mental deviations.

Eat it here.

Only one week before E3 2006, the humongous gaming event that will take place from May 10 to 12 at the Los Angeles Convention Center kicks off. The expo originally started as trade event but as it happened to show all the latest games, consoles and peripherals it quickly became one the gaming industry biggest event. E3 was also famous for its use of booth babes and bikini girls but unfortunatly we won’t see much sexy models for the 2006 edition because some outraged suckers (probably christians or mormons or frigid or feminists or any combination of the previous) decided to ban them from the E3 floor and that’s a major let down for every male and lesbian gamer out there.

“What’s new in 2006 is an update and clarification of the enforcement policies; as we do from time to time, we have taken steps to ensure that exhibitors are familiar with the policy and how it will be enforced,” Mary Dolaher, E3Expo show director, said in an e-mail. She did not comment on the reasons for the change.

E3 2006 in numbers:

- 540000 square feet of exhibit space
- 400 exhibitors
- 1000 video games and products on display
- 60 000+ attendees
- 0 Booth babes… Way to go you dumb bitch.

Check out the E3 Insider web site here.
Read the booth babes ban announcement here.
And watch past years E3 booth babes girls here.

A new password stealing Trojan is quickly spreading over Internet targeting the World of Warcraft community. According to Techweb.com the Trojan is rumoured to be propagating from the gold selling companies and so we decided to elevate the global conspiracy level from yellow to orange. Gold farmers are the source of all evil, eat newborns and smell funny. They all should be shot.

“Win32.WOW is a clear indication that malware writers are targeting anything that involves money,” said MicroWorld chief executive Govind Rammurthy in a statement. “Bucks may be smaller compared to a Trojan that steals bank accounts or credit card numbers…[but] cyber criminals are not complaining as long as the target is soft and numbers are high.”

Meanwhile check out the full article on Techweb here.

There is nothing special about this one but it may be an interesting way to show it off in epeen contests on your World of Warcraft guild forums. Basically you locate your brand-new toy on Thottbot, link it in the generator and it will gives you an image URL. It maybe interesting for some, I will probably more often than not end up just linking directly to Thottbot or Allakhazam.

World of Warcraft Loot Image Generator found here.

Caydiem Leaves the World of Wracraft Team

Caydiem on right, Eyonix on left and some random polearm in the middle.

Apparently, Caydiem one of the most well-known and appreciated Community Manager working at Blizzard is leaving her position. As they say the good ones always goes first and the sad bastards like Tesric will hang to Blizzard balls the longest. *Sigh* The whole message she wrote on the official forums can be found on Ten Ton Hammer because Blizzard message board police has deleted the original thread on the Wow Forums and we can no longer tell her kthnxbai. Fascists.

Ten Ton Hammer article here.

Server transfers PVE –> PVP Causing More QQ

QQ more nubs.

Blizzard allowed last week, for the very first time in the World of Warcraft history, some character transfers from a PVE (player vs. environment) server to some PVP (player vs. player) server after stating numerous times since release that no such thing would be happening in the state of preserving balance. These World of Warcraft realm transfers caused their fair share of drama in the Wow community, with players accusing Blizzard of favouritism and everything eventually degenerated in a “Learn2Transfer” and “QQ more nubs!” fest on the official forums. The main argument of the transfer detractors goes something like this:

1) Blizzard firmly said no to PVE – PVP realms transfer since release.

2) According to some players it is harder to level a character on a PVP realm than a PVE one due to ganking.

3) Thus players that are level 60 (maximum level at this time) coming form a PVE server and moving to a PVP server can be considered twinks by the natives PVP server players.

4) A huge sudden influx of level 60 characters geared with epics items (and whole guild transfers) from a mature server can impair the well being of a small or new server where most of the population is still struggling in their level 20-30.

The protest thread on the official World of Warcraft servers was a delightful 55+ pages long of concentrated drama, theorycraft and conspiracy but was deleted by the Blizzard nazi police.

More World of Warcraft server transfer drama here.

The new Tomb Raider instalment featuring chav Playmate wanna be Lara Croft was released last Tuesday, Tomb Raider: Legend. I really don’t care about the series mainly because these puzzle platformer games burn through my patience faster than a lightsaber burn through Tauntaun’s flesh, but for the sole fact of being a male I had to give the new Tomb Raider title, and mainly Lara Croft, a glance.

Karima Adebide the new face of Lara Croft.

Basically there is not much to say about the new Lara Croft model, she’s got the usual boob perfect digital curves that we learned to love and wage wars for, but there’s something weird, something is not right the way they skinned the 36DD doll and gives the new Lara Croft a strange creepy look. The annoying thing is that I can’t exactly nail what the fuck is wrong with her and it leaves whoever is watching with an unpleasant feeling. It’s not unlike the uncomfortable way you felt before your brain made the connection and you realised that Agent Smith was basically dressed as fucking Elrond in the Fellowship of The Ring and choking on over-buttered popcorn you exclaimed to yourself “Omfg! That’s so fucking gay!”.

Rohna Mitra portraying a badass Lara Croft.

Then I had a look at Karima Adebibe, the new girl Eidos hired for the promotion of their latest Tomb Raider game and at first I think she kinda looked like a sweet Lara Croft, even if I think old school Rohna Mitra looked more badass and was a better impersonation of Tomb Raider’s heroine. Then I caught Karima talking in an interview at Gamspot and while she described the so called features of the new Tomb Raider game I was trying not focus on the fact that she sounded like a pea sized brain bimbo from the booth of the local drag racing team. I understand these girls may not all be the sharpest tool in the shed but fuck when you catch a gem like Karima Adebide to advertise your product you make sure you tell her to fucking shut the fuck up. At one point in the interview she goes and say that “I think it is really cool that Lara stretch her arm while waiting if you haven’t touched the controller for some time”. Why do I am supposed to fucking care if she applies nail polish if I don’t touch the controller for 5 minutes? What about the real stuff like guns, grenades, explosions and general mayhem? Fuck, I guess if I don’t touch the controller for a month I’ll be able to watch mighty Lara apply a tampon or some shit? Cut the crap already, let her bleed the franchise die.

I have been doing a lot of gaming grave digging lately, for my personal enlightenment and entertainment and there is one event often regarded as the ‘Big Crunch’ in the PC gaming history: the painful disintegration of Ion Storm. Ten years have passed since the creation of the mythical game company and to mark this aniversary let us go back at a time when ‘John Romero’ wanted to make us his bitch.

Ion Storm offices at the top of the JP Morgan Chase Tower, Dallas.

Ion Storm was a Dallas based game company created in 1996 by John Romero, Tom Hall, Jerry O’Flaherty, Todd Porter and big time financed ($25 million dollars) by Eidos Software. These were times when Quake was all the craze and ruled the PC gaming world as the only authority. Quake was an improvement on the Doom and Doom 2 blockbusters and everything Romero touched turned into gibs and gold. Back in 96 you could produce a computer game in about a year with less than a million dollar, the internet was going mainstream and the Dot.com irrational exuberance was pointing on the horizon.

Inside view of Ion Storm office.

John Romero was a game designer first and foremost and this is the most cited reason why he quit id software and formed Ion Storm. John Carmak, co-founder of id Software with Romero, is an engineering pioneer and wanted id Software to be driven by developing cutting edge technology, legend have it that Romero being the more ‘artistic’ type disagreed with the direction and left id Software. Romero had a dream of Ion Storm being a place created by artistic people for artistic people (“Design is Law” was the company slogan), this combined with expensive tastes for Ferraris, glamour lifestyle, high exposure and shitload of money lead to one of the most dramatic crash and burn in the gaming history.

Ion Storm main office was supposed to be a gaming Mecca sitting on the top floor of the Chase Tower, one of the highest and most expensive building of downtown Dallas furnished with leather couches, arcades machines, showers, Italian marble, $1500 dollar office chairs and 21” monitors for everyone. The ceiling was a giant glass dome and most employees ended up covering their cubicle with black fabric because it is hard to work on a monitor under direct sunlight. At some point they decided to custom build a huge moving shield at exorbitant price to block the sunlight from the dome.

The whole industry (everything computer related, from the internet to network gaming, becoming mainstream due to bigger sales = more exposure in the medias) was getting more public recognition (the gaming industry generated about 6 billions dollars in 1996) and suddenly it was cool to be a gamer, game designers were mortal Gods, Romero was living like a fucking rock star generating publicity from all sides, everyone was circle jerking with everyone’s money and Ion Storm signed a $13 million dollar deal with Eidos. By the end of 1996 Ion Storm was so fucking hot that it was valuated at $100 million dollars without having released a single game ever.

Ion Storm’s flagship product was Daikatana a revolutionary action game based on the Quake engine licensed from id Software. It would contain 24 levels spanning 4 time periods, 25 weapons and 64 enemies. The whole game was estimated to be produced in 7 months because, according to Romero, id Software development of the Quake’s content portion took only 6 months so if Ion Storm was to be licensing the engine he envisioned they would be able to complete Daikatana in about the same development time. He couldn’t have made a bigger mistake, id Software team was an experienced one and Ion Storm was not. By the time they showed a demo at the 1997 E3 id Software was already working on Quake 2 and Daikatana engine looked date, the Christmas 97 release date was dropped and unfortunately for him and everyone at Ion Storm it all went downhill from there.

Ion Storm then licensed the Quake 2 engine and realized that the switch wouldn’t as easy as they first thought. Lots of code was different from the original Quake and they ended up throwing away 11 months of work and completely rewrote the game. They realized the game couldn’t be shipped in 1998. By that time the gaming medias started to put pressure on Ion Storm after the infamous ‘John Romero is about to make you his bitch – Suck it down’ ad appeared everywhere and generated a lot of negative vibes about Daikatana and Ion Storm. This combined with dubious taste internal politics (Romero’s girlfriend and part time Playboy model Stevie “Killcreek” Case was hired as a level designer) and Ion Storm growing and spending money too fast started to erode moral. By the end of 1998, 12 members of the development team left the company and the release date for Daikatana was pushed further into 1999 infuriating Eidos, who had already sunk $44.8 millions dollar into its development. An agreement was reached in June 1990 and Eidos took ownership of Ion Storm. On April 21, 2000 Daikatana finally went gold, Ion Storm and John Romero’s career went shit.

In retrospect it is amusing to dream of what could have happened to the gaming world if John Romero had succeeded with his Ion Storm dream. As Fargo puts it in one of his Gamespy article:

“There’s definitely a personal tragedy here — I mean, you’ve got ambitious game developers handed the keys to the kingdom, setting their sights too high, and crashing and burning. It was painful to watch. But the bigger tragedy is that it had a bad impact on the industry: For a brief shining moment developers were seen as rock stars and creative types akin to the big expensive talent of the movie industry. And then it all went south. Who knows if it’ll ever be like that again?”

history of Daikatana on 1up.com and download of the GameBoy version here.
Daikatana on Wikipedia here.
Article about Ion Strom on Gamespy here.
More pictures of the Ion Storm offices here.

You just simply can’t. It goes against the rules. To think otherwise would simply be foolish.

Taken from the World of Warcraft official forums. Written by Landfish of the Kalecgos realm I think it summarize really well the state of the Warrior class in World of Warcraft.

While most ’standard’ PvP guides tell you how to beat other classes and stuff, this one tells you what to actually expect in PvP vs each class. The ultimate purpose of this guide is to make you shard your gear and delete your warrior. Once you do this you can make a shaman or a warlock or something, so that can experience World of Warcraft the same way everyone else does.

Ok, here goes!

vs. Hunters
You’re going to get freezing-trapped and aimed-shotted over and over until you die or don’t have enough health to win vs melee+pet. If a trap wears off early (unlikely) and you manage to intercept, you’re going to get scatter-shot. The hunter will feign death, make a trap, and you’ll be trapped again.
Suggested strategy - use full +agility gear and shoot them with your ranged weapon instead of meleeing so you don’t get trapped.

vs. Warlocks
You’re going to get seduced by a succubus and soulfired/shadowbolted from max range(this will be repeated 3 times), plus a shadowbolt or 2 as you run back into range. When you finally reach the warlock after 3 seduces and a total of 5-8 shadowbolts before doing a single damage point, you’ll get death coiled and shadowbolted 2 more times.
Suggested strategy - have over 15,000 life or 200 shadow resistance when you PvP.

vs. Mages
Frost: you’ll get polymorphed then hit with frostbolts. Here is a really short list of ways an ice mage can stop you from hurting them.
mana shield #1
frost nova #1
blink #1
ice barrier #1
ice block #1 for cooldowns
mana shield #2
blink #2
frost nova #2
cold snap for cooldowns
ice barrier #2
blink #3
frost nova #3
ice block #2 for friends to come heal them because they’ll probably be out of mana by now.
Also, you’re slowed the whole time from ice armor and the chill effect on frost bolts. And, for good measure, frost spells, including lvl 1 ice armor, have a chance to root you.
Fire: You’re going to get polymorphed, then the mage will use arcane power and 2 trinkets and you’ll die as a sheep.
Also, when you attack them with mana shield or ice barrier still up, you don’t get rage. This is to make sure you don’t get any wise ideas about winning or something.
Suggested Strategy: have over 15,000 life or 200 frost and 200 fire resistance.

vs. Priests
You’re going to get a dot on you and then you’ll be mind flayed. This damage also heals them because shadowform and power-word shield don’t give priests enough survivability should they choose to fight three people at the same time. Also, when you attack them with a shield up you won’t get any rage (to discourage you from trying to win.)
Suggested Strategy: have over 15,000 life or 200 shadow resistance.

vs. Rogues
If they don’t use any cooldowns you’ll probably win. However, they will use cooldowns. You’re going to get stunlocked to half life, then cold blood eviscerated (they’ll be sprinting around you with evasion up so don’t worry about explaining your l33t warrior strategies n stuff,) then they’l vanish and do it again. If you manage to hit them twice, they’ll blind you and bandage, then restealth and do it again.
Suggested Strategy: Accept that you can be outmeleed by someone who can also have fun being a stealth class.

vs. Druids
They’re basically going to melee you in bear form. If you don’t have an epic weapon they’ll win in bear form. If you do and they’re losing (not guaranteed), they’ll stun you, then root you and heal themselves to full with one spell. Then they’ll start to starfire you until root wears off. When you reach them they’ll go back to bear form and repeat the process. Oh yeah, if they don’t want free honor (hypothetical situation) they can also run away as a cheetah.
Suggested Strategy: Have 50% crit chance and carry a free action potion wherever you go.

vs. Shamans
A shaman has as much armor as you and as much damage as you, except your armor doesn’t help you against his shocks while his armor helps him against your melee attacks. He’s going to kill you faster than you can kill him. If (hypothetically) you win, he’ll ahnk and kill you.
Suggested Strategy: Use recklessness if it’s up, along with a potion, tuber and lifestone. Alternative strategy: Have 15,000 life.

vs. Paladins
This is a warrior with 3 times as much life as you. Or three warriors with 1/3 the dmg you do. 3 is probably more than 1, so I don’t think I need to get into this.
Suggested Strategy: Use intimidating shout and run away. He’ll be pissed because he can’t catch you.

vs. other Warriors
They’re going to do the same thing you do, and the outcome is determined by luck and gear rather than what someone does or doesn’t do. (Warriors can only attack.)
Therefore, it isn’t fun, and you both lose.

I hope this guide was helpful. Good luck and have fun while sharding your gear. Remember to set auction housed items slightly lower in price than others up for sale to assure that they’ll be sold fast, so you can start your new character with a bit of gold to help with gear for leveling.

Disclaimer - Warriors are good with a priest or paladin healing and cleansing them. However, that also means you need two people to make one person’s character viable in PvP.

I already did some coverage about how the gold farming business is killing Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (mmorpg’s) as you can see it covered here. I just happen to find an interesting website recently that cover and take a stand against the gold farming practice in online games. As mmorpg’s getting more and more popular since their commercial introduction in 1997, the practice of gold farming is getting more popular than ever reaching obscene levels lately with hugely popular games like World of Warcraft and Lineage 2.

The main problems associated with gold farming in mmorpg’s are mainly that they screw up the virtual economies over time and the fact that some unscrupulous companies set up so called gold farming sweat shops in which people are forced to work insane hours with piss poor work conditions for ridiculous wages. It should be noted also that gold farmers also affect the gaming experience of the ‘legit’ (non-farmers) players by making resources or monsters/quests acquiring harder than it was initially planed by the mmorpg’s developers by farming the same resources or monsters over and over.

“As referenced here in my blog and as many of you already know, IGE is a slave driving sweatshop business. But of course they don’t admit it, they pay children (16 years) China/Japan/Korea and other poor countries to sit in un-air-conditioned warehouses to play 12 hours a day for 1$ an hour. Tomo and I had walked by a room with over 20 over worked / tired and miserable adults and teenagers sitting in front of computers playing World of Warcraft. We were both sick, we had written scripts so that they could sit in front of computers all day to make no where near enough money to get by.

Yes it is their decision they are not slaves but they are being taken advantage of and everyone who buys gold (I’m sure most of WoW’s player base) supports it. We walked into that office took the check, and reported the building to authorities. It was shut down and moved I am sure to a different place within a week.”

A must see for everyone concerned about gold farming practice, or just playing a mmorpg, the No Gold website can be found here.

It’s a sad known fact that after more than a year since public release the classes of World of Warcraft could still use some tweaking and adjustment due to some obvious bugs and issues causing imbalance mostly in PvP (player vs player) situations. The official forums are full of threads in the line of “zomfg@$it’s the broken fikzit!” and the like. But on occasion you come across the post of a disgruntled player that makes you smile. This is exactly what happened this morning.

Lujan a warrior from the Ubiquitous guild on the Blackrock World of Warcraft server had a grip about how Bloodthirst, the high-end talent of the Fury specification, worked and the frustration that may result from bad design decisions.

Each of the nine classes of World of Warcraft are broke down into tree sub-classes called specification or specs for short. The 3 warrior spec trees are called Arms, Fury and Protection. Bloodthirst is the top end talent of the Fury tree making it in theory the most powerful power of that specification.

Basically what Lujan is saying is that the talent could use some developer attention because the way it works now makes Arms specification, with its high-end talent called Mortal Strike, the only really viable choice for the Warrior class when it comes to dealing high burst damage. The Protection tree being useless at best for PvP.

Lujan World Of Warcraft thread about Bloodthirst here.
Issues about the Warrior classe here.

This could happen more often that you think in the near future.

According to their official web site The Syndicate®, a more than 10 year old Ultima Online, Everquest and more recently World of Warcraft guild, just registered its guild name.

“As one of the oldest, largest and most powerful guilds in all of online gaming, The Syndicate® has developed a strong reputation over the years. We seek to protect that reputation from misuse of our guild name and have taken the step of Trademarking our guild name “The Syndicate®” along with our logo and our motto.”

The Syndicate® operates on the Zuljin World of Warcraft server and I don’t know shit about the legal implications if you happen to run a guild with the same name on another server, but according to them:

Can We Use Your Mark As Our Guild/Clan/Organization Name?
No. The Syndicate® does not grant permission to use our Mark to any other groups, for any online gaming related endeavor. That includes, but is not limited to, online gaming guilds/clans/organization names and online gaming related site names. Permission to use The Syndicate® has never been granted and if you see anyone using the mark please report them to us and we will take the necessary action to protect our mark.

Can I Misspell To Get Around The Mark?
No, you cannot. Deliberate misspellings are a violation of trademark law as well. Also tacking words onto the Mark is also a violation. Legally that is known as being “confusingly similar” and we site a concrete example, above, that we ran into when we tried to register our mark. Some examples of things that would be a Mark violation are as follows (Note: this list is NOT all inclusive. These are merely some common examples):

Syndicate
Cyndicate
Syndikat
Sindicate
The Cyndicate
The Syndicate XXXXXX (where XXXXXX is some other word)
The XXXXXX Syndicate (where XXXXXX is some other word)

Sounds like a huge pile of nazi shit to me. And it raises the question of one game specific EULA (End User License Agreement), is it conflicting or does it violate one EULA to run a registered guild or product into one copyrighted work? Who fucking knows, one thing for sure is that it’s pushing further the old ‘virtual-property’ debate. After people buying items and currency in a virtual world with real world money we are now facing trademarked guilds. Maybe in the near future we will see the birth of legal trademarked farmers guilds that are being run like small business. Fuck, and I though that the whole point was to play a game and have fun.

Raph Koster a designer for the original Ultima Online had a view about this here.
The Syndicate® official web site can be found here.
Previous Igloolounge.net coverage about player owned properties in virtual worlds is here.

Ding! Level 1 to 60 in just two days. You better pack on ramen.

The timing may be a bit off, it is probably more accurate to say that leveling from 1 to 60 will take around a week at best with some people sharing shifts over the same character, but still an excellent source to what to kill and where to powerlevel.

Two Day Grind
Horde Grinding Spots:
0-15 - Questing fastest possible exp.
15-20 - The Barrens - Harpies *
15-20 - The Barrens - Bristleback(s) *
20-25 - The Barrens - Bael Dun Exavs *
20-25 - Hillsbrad - Hillsbrad Farmers (etc)
22-26 - Thousand Needles - Galak Scouts (etc) *
26-30 - Hillsbrad - Mud Gnolls *
25-30 - Thousand Needles - Grimtotems
30-38 - Shimmering Flats - All monsters. *
38-40 - Dustwallow Swamp - Very North East Islands, Murlock Warriors/Oracles.

Horde And Alliance Grinding Spots:
40-46 - Feralas - Woodpaws (stay away from the ones that disease for
slow casting speeds) **
46-48 - Feralas - Frayfeather Skystormers *
48-50 - Feralas - Harpies
48-51 - Southwest of Gadgetzan - Thistleshrubs *
50-54 - Western Plaguelands - First ‘field’ to the left, assorted monsters.
54-60 - Western Plaguelands - Scarlet Lumberjacks
52-60 - Eastern Dire Maul - Lashers ****

* = Recommended

EXP Rates:
Levels 30-40 = 18-20k exp/hour
Levels 40-51 = 20-25k exp/hour
Levels 52-60 = 40-50k exp/hour (Dire Maul)

Power Leveling
This is the method the power levelers have used since closed beta and I finally got one of them to give it up. It is by no means the way to go if you want to maximize your experience in the game as this method will bypass almost all the content in the game and essentially ignore many of the fun, unique aspects of WoW. This is not recommended for new players and is meant for players who already have experienced the content and just want to level up an alt to play with their level 60 friends (ie. your level 60 instance group needs a priest and there are no priests to be had). As a benchmark to how successful you are with this, download cosmos (Cosmos) and use the clock feature to measure your xp/hour. At level 50 you should be getting about 40,000+/hour. 1-20: Newbie lands, stick to the friendly zones (not contested). Just grind. The quests are a waste of time up to level 20 if you are focusing on maxing out xp per hour. 20-26: Wetlands quests and raptors/slime/orcs for grinding. Redridge mountain Lakeshire quests.

26-30: Duskwood quests and undead for grinding. Hillsbrad critter roamers for grinding.

30-35: Did these all in a day on Daggerspines in Hillsbrad right next to Southshore along the coast. Huge spawn, very fast respawn rate, easy mobs to kill. Purgation isle (island in the very far Southwest water area of Hillsbrad) also a nice secluded place you can grind on undead.

36-40: Hillsbrad southshore quests. Desolace quests and kodo grinding for 36-38, then Undead Ravagers in the southeast for 38-40. Cresting exiles at the circle of outer binding in Arathi also for 37-41; extremely easy mobs with a fast respawn. Alterac ogres from 35-40 for grinding. Drywhisker kobolds in Arathi east of Hammerfall for 36-39 for grinding.

41-45: Hinterlands trolls, owl beasts, and wolves for grinding and quests. Badlands ogres, gnolls, and quests.

45-48: Tanaris quests and pirates on the eastern paninsula for grinding. Stranglethorn vale quests (only if you need rewards imo). Badlands greater elementals for grinding.

48-52: Felwood deadwood gnolls for grinding and quests from the sanctuary in the south. Blasted lands dreadmauls for grinding. Un’goro crater (best started at 50) for primarily quests and grinding off the plants and tar elementals. Azshara undead highbornes and thunderhead hyppogriffs for grinding.

52-55: Azshara blood elves for grinding. Burning steppes dreadmaul rock ogre caves firegut ogres (very low AC) for grinding. Felwood irontree woods and cave for grinding (great spot). Western plaguelands questing for argent dawn and grinding on undead throughout the various camps.

55-58: Eastern plaguelands quests from the sanctuary, grinding on undead at the ruined towns. Winterspring grinding at winterfall village or Lake Kel’Theril undead highbornes (my personal favorite camp). Blackrock Stronghold in Burning Steppes for grinding.

58-60: “The” yeti cave in Winterspring, due Southeast of Everlook (very nice place). Grosh Gok compound ogres in Deadwind pass (great spot, no one knows about it). Eastern plaguelands Fungal Vale undead grinding and argent dawn token farming. Moonowls in northeast winterspring for grinding.

Thanks to JaSon11 from the forums for the information.

Originaly posted on wowguru.

Pwned. Logging screen of many World of Warcraft players after patch 1.9.

The newest patch 1.9: The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj for World of Warcraft as been released by Blizzard last week and the Igloolounge share its impressions on the latest fix.

At first the new 20 and 40 man raid dungeons, new armor models, new auction houses in capital cities and the paladin talent overhaul seem impressive stuff to drool over, but what is even more impressive is Blizzard new way to define the ‘all hell broke lose we are incompetent retards’ nightmare often associated with patch days.

Indeed, after waiting like forever and half for the stupid patch to download (Blizzard use a bloated torrent architecture to share it’s patches), we found ourselves stuck at the logging screen for over 30 minutes. When it finally managed to log us in we got stuck again at the character retrieval screen for another 25 minutes. We did not mind at first because, let’s face it, when 4 million morons and their mother want to get back in the game after a major patch upgrade latency and delay are something to be expected. We just couldn’t have predicted how far Blizzard elevated the art of releasing a broken patch for a mmorpg until we actually lagged our way into the game.

General lag, mail lag, auction houses lag, inventory lag, combat lag, the lag monster was everywhere and no St-George from Blizzard to slay the beast. It was almost like getting into a time warp washing machine to find ourselves back to the glory days of Beverly Hills 90210 and 300 bauds modems. It wouldn’t be so bad if they haven’t messed with some characters skills, for example a warrior using his charge ability into water would find himself desynchronized with the server and booted having to get through the painful 50 minutes delay to get back in. Broke some character abilities, nerfed things without acknowledging it into patch note and so on.

Comprehensive technical graphic of what the fuck is going on.

It’s been one week now, Blizzard released patch 1.9.1 yesterday and managed to fix some of the issues but latency, frequent disconnection and logging problems remain. World of Warcraft has been released for over a year now and there is an expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, stated for release next March and some issues that plagued the game from day one are still in the game today. It think it’s time for Blizzard to get their shit straight. As one pissed player said on the forums ‘ Blizzard should fix the old crap before adding the new crap ‘. Learn 2 patch fuckers.

Caught on the World of Warcraft forums. It’s a di$co sweet parody about the priest class being unable to kill in PvP (player vs player). Althought the class is nowhere near perfect, priests aren’t probably as gimped as the song pretends.

It’s Friday night dance dance fever at Ironforge.

Original Song: I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor)
Parody Title: I Won’t Survive

At first I was dazed,
Then I was Mortal Striked,
Kept thinking I would always live
If I could duck and hide
But they’ve made so many mods
For Arathi and Warsong
They grew strong
I was their target all along

And so they’re back
They start to chase
I try to run but they break fear
Before I could even melt a face
I should have played a stupid ‘lock
I should have stuck to PvE
If I had known it takes two seconds
To kill a Priest in PvP

You say “Now go, go cry some more”
I’ll just respec now
I won’t be healing anymore
Weren’t you the one who said that Priests were in short supply
You think I’m humble
You think I’ll do more than die?

Oh no, not I
I won’t survive
As long as they can break my fear
I know I won’t stay alive
I don’t have snares, stuns or root
So I might as well drop loot
I can’t survive
I won’t survive

I used all the spells I had
But they still kicked my ass
I find it hard to believe
That we’re a “broken” class
And they’ve made oh so many mods
To keep a target on myself
I used to die
Now I reroll instead of cry
And you see me
Somebody new
I’m not that stupid Holy Priest that should be healing you
And so you felt like queueing up
And you spam raid chat with “heal plz”
But I’d rather do my healing
As a Shaman or Pally

You say “Now go, go cry some more”
I’ll just reroll now
You won’t get healing anymore
Weren’t you the one who said that Priests were in short supply
You think I’m humble
You think I’ll do more than die?

Official thread can be reached here.

The Vin Diesel madness taking over the World of Warcraft servers.

There has been a lot of talk lately on the Barrens general chat and on the World of Warcraft forums about Vin Diesel who supposedly plays a shaman in the game. The Vin Diesel fad quickly escalated last October into a server wide phenomenon to the point that many posts about Vin Diesel on Blizzard message boards had to be moderated or deleted by the forums admins. The Igloolounge.net is taking a plunge and uncover the origins of the “OMFG!@ Vin Diesel is a Shaman” myth.

The Vin Diesel plays a shaman fad is not really new actually and can be tracked back on some World of Warcraft fan site forums as far as early 2005 with a little bit of Googling skills and link digging. Unfortunately there is no clear evidence as where and how the Vin Diesel fad exploded on the internet, although most trails we followed pointed us to a web site called Random Facts About. The web site appears to be a database of over the top humorous facts about; Mr.T, Chuck Norris and you guessed it Vin Diesel. The way it works is that about everyone can add it’s own fact about Vin Diesel, Chuck Norris or Mr.T and facts are then ranked according to other people votes, a system which resembles Bash.org. Here is a couple of example of random facts about Vin Diesel:

Vin Diesel has two speeds: walk and kill.
Vin Diesel played Russian Roulete with a fully loaded gun and won.
If you rearrange the letters in Vin Diesel it reveals his credo: “I End Lives.”
Crop circles are Vin’s way of telling the world that sometimes corn needs to lie the fuck down.
There is no theory of evolution, just a list of creatures Vin Diesel allows to live.

This is after digging through the huge database of nearly 4000 facts that we found these two gems:

If Vin Diesel was a Shaman and Tony Danza was a Paladin, Vin Diesel would totally kick Tony Danza’s ass. Unless Danza used his shield and hearthed. Pussy.
Vin Diesel plays World of Warcraft under the alias Din Viesel.

The infamous Learn 2 Play poster on You’re The Man Now Dog.

The last fact is particularly interesting as it is also referred on Ten Ton Hammer, a website about online gaming, in its Friday Vin Diesel Fact. Taken the humorous nature of the Random Fact About web site it is easy to see how the “Vin Diesel plays World of Warcraft under the alias Din Viesel” line found it’s way as a joke in the game and spread like wild fire creating mass hysteria. The craze reached a peak last November and it is now commonly accepted among the World of Warcraft community that Vin Diesel is the patron of the shaman class. This may not be Blizzard Entertainment view on the matter as the forums moderators continue to serial delete most posts about Vin Diesel.

More recently the World of Warcraft Vin Diesel craze also reached You’re The Man Now Dog, and it seems that we wont see the end of the of this Dieselomania soon. The Igloolounge.net couldn’t leave its fans out of the hysteria and present its own spinoff of the learn2play poster. Enjoy.

Edit (14/1/06): Closer examination of the Random Fact About web site teach us that everything all unsurprisingly originated from the Something Awful forums.

After Learn 2 Play and Learn 2 Play 2 - Igloolounge.net proudly presents A Shaman Apart.

The Random Fact About Vin Diesel website can be reached here
Vin Diesel Learn2play poster on You’re The Man Now Dog can be seen here