A while back fellow WoW Insider blogger Adam posted his thoughts on PvP, calling PvE the only real game. He makes excellent, valid points as to why he believes this is so, such as the fact that it is quite impossible to level from 1 to 70 through PvP alone. The game was designed around a PvE-centric environment, and the relatively late additions of the Battlegrounds and Honor system are a testament to that. In those respects, Adam is completely correct.
Of course, many of you took issue with his statements, even prompting him to publish his personal counterpoint on the matter. As an avid PvP player, I found some of what Adam said to be less than savory myself. It has to be noted that Adam has extensive PvE endgame experience, and his opinions come from a raider's perspective. I will concede his first two points -- you cannot progress in World of Warcraft through PvP alone and that PvP was a mere afterthought. On the other hand, Adam's other points don't quite hold as much water.
Let's get one thing out of the way: this isn't an epeen-stroking session. When you go into the Tournament Realm joining a 1382 team that went 3-11 on its debut week, you have to set your expectations right. Aside from Amanda Dean, or Mandy, who's professed an enjoyment for Arenas, the WoW Insider team is composed of people who don't have extensive Arena experience. We also have Adam Holisky, who doesn't consider PvP to be the 'real' game (whatever that means), and Amanda Miller, who covers our Sunday Morning Funnies. I do a fair amount of Arena on live myself and our team is rated enough to garner us Season 3 swag every two weeks or so. You do the math. But here's the thing -- Arena is a team game. Like every team sport, it relies on synergy, teamwork, and communication. The top players in the world know this, and team leaders replace underperforming members regularly with a dose of nerd rage for good measure. That's just competitive Arena play.
On the other hand, WoW Insider's venture into the Tournament Realm is more of a journalistic exercise than anything else. For one thing, I'm not even eligible to actually participate in the actual tournament because my country isn't on the list, so my expectations of going far in this tournament is nil. To be perfectly honest, that's a good thing. Ironically, I feel a lot less pressure to perform on the TR with the WoW Insider Team than I do on live. In fact, I even ventured to play as a Retribution Paladin only because I can. I had initially created a Restoration Shaman named Insiderzach but since Mandy was running with a Restoration Druid, I thought I could have a little fun with running double melee with Adam so I made a Paladin. After all, it is my favorite class.
Twice a week, our writers will tell you more about themselves, and let you get to know them and the characters they play a little better. Click here to read more About the Bloggers.
What do you do for WoW Insider? I'm a standard issues blogger, reporting on just about everything I can get my hands on. I like to concentrate on raid and high-end PvE issues, since that's where I spend most of my time in game. I've also go a few projects in the work for our sister site, Massively. I think my first article should pop up over there next week (knock on wood)...
What's your main right now? My main is a Protection Spec Human Warrior on Eldre'Thalas. He's been my main since March of 2005. However, I have flirted at times with the possibility of switching to a Priest full time, but that was back in November of 2006. However that said, I also have many other alts that I give a lot of care and love. One of my favorite things to do is to run the level 70 five mans with friends, all of us running on our fourth or fifth alt. It's kinda fun!
Last night, the WoW Insider arena team stepped into battle for the first time on the arena tournament realms, and it was immediately apparent that things were going to be quite different from our experiences on the tournament test realms.
For starters, there were way fewer people. I also noticed that, contrary to my expectations that everyone shelling out an extra $20 to play here would be a hardcore arena-goer, there were many people on just to have fun. General chat was full of people who didn't know where to go, how to allocate their talent points, and even people who hadn't formed teams yet!
Still, despite the fact the vendor areas had a drastically reduced population, the queues were amazingly short, as Adam points out. Often, I was reading that my team had joined the queue at the same time I was clicking to enter the battle.
Last Saturday on the weekly podcast, we used the whole show to take a look at multiboxing. We had multiboxer Xzin on, along with Adam Holisky from WoW Insider, Duncor of WoW Radio, and myself, and we chatted all about this strange and interesting way to play MMO games like World of Warcraft.
We took a look first at the history of multiboxing, including how Xzin originally got interested in it.
We examined how exactly it is done, including not only the equipment you need to make it work, but how much multiboxers pay in account fees.
We talked with Xzin about the limits of PvE multiboxing, including class combinations and how far you can get running a raid group by yourself
And in the second half of the show, we get into some of the controversy about multiboxing, including whether it's fair for multiboxers to take their characters into PvP, and whether Blizzard will ever change or reconsider their decision that multiboxing is legal
And finally we talked about the future of multiboxing -- will any MMO game every actually embrace playing multiple accounts at a time as a gameplay mechanic?
Pretty interesting stuff -- not only did we talk objectively about a lot of what multiboxing is, but we were able to debate a little bit about whether it's fair, or whether the game is meant to be played in strange ways like this. The show is now available for a listen over on the WoW Radio website, and of course on iTunes as well.
If you have input on how the show went or anything else you'd like us to cover on the WoW Insider Show (especially any other guests you might like us to have on), leave a comment below or email us at theshow@wowinsider.com. Next week we'll be back to normal on the show (we're planning to finally have a nice hardcore PvP chat), so stay tuned this weekend for more about our weekly podcast.
Multiboxing -- we've mentioned it quite a fewtimes here on WoW Insider, and it's always been a controversial subject. While the game is quite clearly not designed around players playing multiple characters at once, Blizzard has stated that they have no problem with it -- as long as people are paying for each account they use, and not using third-party programs to control their characters, Blizzard is fine with it.
But I, Mike Schramm, personally have always been quite against the idea of multiboxing. Lots of folks have used macros and programming to control multiple characters all the way up to level 70 and beyond, and some have even taken teams of characters into PvP areas to win battlegrounds and gain honor, or even win the arena seasons, and all the rewards that come with that victory. In my opinion, that's a horrible mockery of the way the game was designed -- this is a social game that is meant to be played with other players, and to pit one person with five computers against a real-life team of five people just isn't fair or interesting. Sure, you might be able to control the movements of five characters with skilled programming and control, but the other team has to coordinate five human minds all together, a much harder and more interesting act, in my personal opinion. I am firmly against multiboxing -- it's not the way this game is meant to be played at all, and while Blizzard may be content to make more money off of someone paying for many accounts, I'm not content to be stuck in a game with them.
Which is why, this Saturday on the WoW Insider Show over on WoW Radio (at 3:30pm EST), our guest will be Xzin, one of the most notorious (and popular) multiboxers the game has ever seen.
About a week and a half ago I reported on an experience I had in Mount Hyjal while fighting Azgalor. While the fight went fine and we did him in one try, I wasn't on Azgalor's threat list and thus did not get any loot. I wasn't on the threat table because I had to tank some spawned demons up and away from the rest of the raid. It was a rather nice conflict of game mechanics.
This all happened on Tuesday, March 18th. By Saturday, March 22nd, I had the two shiny pieces of loot that were coming to me: Glory of the Defender and Onslaught Handguards. Specialist Game Master Skelend had sent me the items, along with a form letter apologizing for the issues we experienced in game. I was quite happy to see this resolved. I was even more pleased that it was resolved quickly and did not take a few weeks; as many people, both those of you who left comments and friends of mine that I talked to, said it would.
So what are we doing to make sure this never happens again? Well for one thing, all the melee is hitting the boss now with a ranged weapon after the tank gets a couple hits in. That's pretty much all we can do to assure this problem doesn't pop up again for us. Despite a few enquires I've made, there is no word from Blizzard if they've fixed this. I suspect that one day it'll just be hotfixed without much fanfare.
All in all, not a terrible experience when something went wrong. Quick and quality support from Blizzard.
What? Stress Test, Part Deux Who? Blizzard CMs, GMs, Devs, and the WoW Insider Arena Team Where? Tournament Test Server When? Tonight at 5:00 p.m to 8:00 p.m, PST
Got all that? Good. Drysc announced last night Blizzard will be holding another round of stress testing on the tournament test realm. Why? Because they want more attention. I for one, am going to give it to them. In fact, WoW Insider will again have a crew on the server covering all the action. We'll all be hopping around on toons named like "Insideradam", "Insideralex", and "Insiderzach". So be sure to drop by and say hello again!
If you missed the last stress test, it was a ton of fun. We have a huge gallery of screen shots of just about everything you could want to see. Blizzard devs were there handing out mounts, chicken and gnome costumes, and even teleporting the WoW Insider staff away for some quite alone time with a Brutallus disguised Englewood.
If you're lucky enough to see us, just give us a /wave or a /hug and we'll try to snap a screen shot with you for our upcoming Stress Test Part Deux gallery. We'll also be live blogging all the activity on the TTR during the event, so even if you can't make it - you can still see what's happening. Our live blog is also a really good place to check and see if the server is up or down.
Sunday's Tournament Test Realm stress test was, in my opinion, a huge success. Despite the lag, the occasional crash or kick, and a one-hour maintenance downtime, the server held up quite well considering just how many people were bombing around on it. After maintenance, the lag improved quite a bit, and I'm guessing that Blizzard learned a fair amount that will help them to design the arena tournament realm.
Of course, interaction with the GMs, fighting spawned bosses dropping orange epics, being polymorphed into all sorts of things, receiving rare mounts, and reading through /general, /say, and /yell, not to mention tells, were the real highlights from yesterday. While Alex has already given a fairly detailed account of our adventures, I have some stories of my own to tell.
If you're looking for us, we're playing under the banner "WoW Insider". My name is "insideradam", Alex Ziebart's name is "insideralex", and Amanda Miller's name is "Vehn". We'll be joined by other writers throughout the stress test. I'll also be live blogging the event in about 30 minutes from now.
The Tournament Test Realm outside of the Orc starting area.
We've been covering the Tournament Test Realm (TTR) lately, especially the stress test tomorrow between 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. PST. It's going to be a lot of fun I'm sure – assuming the server can stay up.
And the best part about it all?
WoW Insider will be there in force! The TTR team from WoW Insider will include folks like myself, Amanda Dean, Amanda Miller, Alex Ziebart, and other writers. We'll be there trying to be king of the hill during the arena tests. Our team name is "WoW Insider" (creative, huh?) and we'll be fighting FOR the Horde.
So grab your sword and fight us Horde! Come on over and join the fun - and if you happen to hit us in battle, don't forget to take a screen shot of us standing victoriously over your dead bodies! ;-)
This past Saturday the WoW Insider Show welcomed Amanda Dean and Adam Holisky on, as well as myself and Turpster, for the 26th episode of our podcast on WoW Radio. Despite some lackluster, if I may say so, email from readers (you can send us some better emails at theshow@wowinsider.com), we charged through and got a lot of good discussion done:
We chatted about Amanda's hacked characters, and what a little name-dropping will get you from Blizzard (not much)
We confronted whether all this new badge loot makes raiding worthless (surprise -- we decided it does not)
We talked about all the new class changes on the PTR, with a special look at Shamans, and the Warlock change to Lifetap.
All in all, good show, and you can listen to it right now over on WoW Radio's website. You can also subscribe to our podcast in iTunes if you so choose, and we'll be back at it again next weekend -- every Saturday at 3:30pm EST. Enjoy the show!
Tomorrow afternoon, Saturday, February 23rd at 3:30pm EST on WoW Radio, we'll go live on the air yet again with our august podcast. This week, we've got myself and Turpster as usual (did you hear that he's doing something every week on Tuesday over at Massively nowadays?), and relative WI newbies Amanda Dean and Adam Holisky will be along for the ride. We'll be chatting about all those patch 2.4 changes we've seen in the past week (including the vaporous promise of Shaman buffs), what Heroic Badges are really for, what our compadre Elizabeth Harper heard at GDC, and of course we've got to get the inside story from Adam about what made him so bitter about PuGs.
Should be a good time as always. Meet up with us at 3:30pm EST tomorrow afternoon on WoW Radio, and if you'd like (and you have IRC), you can also join us in chat on irc.mmoirc.com, in the #wowradio channel during the show. And if you have a comment, complaint, conundrum, or compliment for us, you can always send it along to theshow@wowinsider.com. We're getting tons of great emails there lately, so we can't answer them all on the show, but we'll answer yours if we can. See you tomorrow!
P.S. Oh, and I almost forgot -- as promised last week, we will have exclusive news of a brand new, upcoming WoW Insider contest. Listen in to the show to find out what we're planning!
Twice a week, our writers will tell you more about themselves, and let you get to know them and the characters they play a little better. 
Last Saturday on the weekly podcast, we used the whole show to take a look at multiboxing. We had .jpg)
Multiboxing
About a week and a half ago 
What? Stress Test, Part Deux
Subscribe
