Joystiq has your stash of criminally complete GTA IV news!
Posts with tag comments

All the World's a Stage: Finding the right realm


One of the most common difficulties many roleplayers face is that of finding other people to roleplay with. To help overcome this challenge, All the World's a Stage presents a guide to finding roleplayers in three parts: "finding the right realm" for roleplaying, "joining the right circle" of roleplaying friends, and "wearing the right mask" to attract other roleplayers to you.

Due to reasons we have discussed earlier, RP servers can vary widely from a very few who maintain their immersive roleplaying atmosphere, to the majority which often seem little different from a normal PvE or PvP server. Although Blizzard takes their RP server guidelines "seriously," they cannot enforce these rules wholesale, and rely on the players themselves to do much of their own policing and reporting where necessary. RP servers thus vary a great deal in terms of how many people there actually make roleplaying a priority, how many will report someone breaking the RP rules, and how many will strive to maintain that precious gem of mass cooperation: the roleplaying atmosphere.

It may not be obvious to a new player, but there are tools roleplayers can use to find the realm that suits them best. There may be no standardized way to group up for RP, but the fact holds true: "seek, and ye shall find."

Continue reading All the World's a Stage: Finding the right realm

Breakfast Topic: Instance for sale

Ixus sent us a question about hiring mercenaries in World of Warcraft: he's a level 20 Warlock who paid a level 57 a whopping 1g to run him through Deadmines since he couldn't find a group for it. We have mentioned this topic before, but it's usually in posts about beggars, and I don't know if we've actually considered what could be a cottage industry: actually setting rates and hiring out higher levels to complete various tasks for lowbies.

Is this an OK thing to do. I'll admit that I've run lowbies through instances before, but never for gold -- usually it's a friend of mine who just wants some extra gear from a certain instance. And I've been offered gold for an instance run, but I've never accepted it, and I'm not even sure what I would charge to actually run someone through an instance (I'd probably have pretty high terms: 5-10g and a portion of the drops, depending on what class was going through).

Have you? Do you think this is the kind of thing that's legit (and if so, should Blizzard maybe even implement a "looking for mercenaries" channel for lowbies to find their benefactors?), or should lowbies all go find their own groups like you had to and stop pestering you to run them through Wailing Caverns for their pittance?

New icons for commenters!


In honor of our new comment system here at WoW Insider, I've made some icons for our readers to use! Now instead of the mystery man in the little box next to your comment, you can use one of these neat icons. Don't know how? No problem! It's very easy.

First, browse the gallery of new icons below, and find one you like, then click on it. After the picture has loaded, right click it, and choose "Save As" (or "Save Image As" if you're using Firefox), and then save the picture to your desktop.

Next, find one of your comments and click on your name. This should take you to your Profile page. After signing in with your password, click on "Edit picture," then hit the "Browse" button. Navigate to the desktop (or wherever you saved the image from earlier), select the image, and click "Open."

Finally, hit the "Upload" button to upload your new icon to your profile. Now all of your comments will be accompanied by the image you've selected, instead of the mystery man in the gray box!

Gallery: Commenter Icons

VelenLady VashjThrallSylvannasSporeling

RSS feed has errors, will be fixed soon

Just wanted to thank everyone who has sent in tips about the error messages on our RSS feed (which you can find right here, when it's working, which is most of the time). We are aware the feed is broken, we have forwarded every one of your notes on to our technical guys, and hopefully the error will be fixed soon.

And while we're at it, I'll take this opportunity as well to remind everybody about our tips form, ready and willing to receive any news you have for us. If you've heard or seen something big about the World of Warcraft that we haven't posted yet, feel free to drop us a note. Unfortunately, due to the volume of tips coming in, we can't answer everything you send (although we do try to-- some folks have sent technical questions about the game to us, which we try to answer to the best of our ability, as well as on our Ask WoW Insider feature). But we do read each and every note sent through that form, and there's no better way to contact us with tips, feedback, errors like the RSS feed problem, or anything else you'd like to tell us.

Thanks for reading and letting us know what you think. We appreciate it!

Enter to win a signed WoW TCG playmat from WoW Insider


The other weekend, I went out to Schaumberg, IL to meet up with the guys from Upper Deck at the WoW TCG Darkmoon Faire. And not only did I walk away with a couple of interviews and a lot of pictures, they also hooked me up with these two rare playmats, which we're giving away to two lucky readers!

The one on top was given away to everyone who participated in the main tournament at the Darkmoon Faire events, and the one on the bottom features art by none other than Gabe of Penny Arcade. Oh, and you can't see it in the picture, but both mats are signed by none other than Mike Hummel, head of Upper Deck's R&D, and co-creator of the WoW TCG.

To enter, just leave a comment (one comment and only one comment) on this post right here. As usual, the contest is only open to US residents age 13 and up (rest of the official rules here). Tomorrow morning at 11am EST, I'll close the comments and we'll choose two at random to each receive one playmat each. Good luck, comment away!

Update: Contest over, comments closed. Thanks for entering everyone-- check your email to see if you won.

To comment or not to comment...

I certainly hope that you'll decide to comment -- especially since we've got a swanky new comment system running now. One of my own pet peeves about commenting here in the past was the need for e-mail confirmation, which was handy for keeping spam out, but was slow and potentially annoying when you wanted to leave comments. With this new system, you can set a password linked to your e-mail address and use it to make comments -- sans confirmation e-mails -- on sites throughout the Weblogs, Inc network. So set yourself up in the system and feel free to speak your peace -- sans e-mail confirmation.

Update: To answer a few frequent questions:

Yes, you will be able to change your password; our developers are working on the tool that will allow you to do so. In the meantime, we are hard-pressed to think of any modern browser that will not automagically remember your password for you -- please use this as a temporary solution!

Extraneous http:// links inserted in some name links will be fixed very shortly.

The "E-mail me when someone replies" function is only going to email you when someone replies to your specific comment -- not to the post in general. Let this be a hint to you that we will be rolling out Engadget-style comment threading in the future , and this is where that feature will come into play. However, currently our comments are not yet threaded, so you shouldn't actually get any email reply notifications -- yet! Stay tuned... Rome.com wasn't built in a day.

Thottbot will be fine

Just in case you were worried that all the comments you had put into Thottbot were gone, don't be. We've heard from the man himself and everything is going to be fine.

In an email, Thott says "Some of the back end stuff lost its mind and kept reporting threads as non-existent. The site calmly accepted this and created a new thread start each time someone posted a comment. Now there are multiple thread starts for each page. Once I write something to merge them all it'll be back to normal."

Great to hear that one of the best WoW resources on the Internet is safe and secure. Where else could you learn how Goblin Rocket Fuel can lead to online romance between an engie and an alkie? (second comment)

Comments wiped on Thottbot

Sometime today, it seems as though the comments on Thottbot.com were wiped. Maybe. Some Thottbot entries, like this one for Atiesh, have plenty of old comments still on them. But others which definitely used to have comments, like the Bad Mojo Mask, seem to be wiped clean.

Which is definitely trouble, because while there are a lot of WoW resources out there, Thottbot was well known not only for its completeness (they even had spells in there that were only used by NPCs or objects), but for the player comments on each quest. Not only could you find out where a mob spawned, but you could see players telling you how hard it was, how they had beaten it with their 49 lock by chain fearing, and whether the rewards were good or bad. Without the comments, Thott's just not Thott.

There's a few rumors floating around as to why this happened-- it could just be a server mistake, or it could be an attempt by Thott to clean out the gold sellers that were advertising in the comments. Some of the comments may have disappeared and come back, so it could be just a temporary thing (unfortunately the site news doesn't provide any clues because... it was wiped, too). I've dropped a note to Thott himself to see if he can give us any feedback on the subject-- I'll let you know if we hear any more

So if you've ever used Thottbot in the past, now's the perfect time to give back-- leave a comment on a few quests or items you know well to help rebuild the database. I'm sure a site like WoWHead would love to take advantage of Thott while they're down, but Thott's the first and original. I would hate to see them go down like this, especially if it's a tech mistake of some kind.

Update: Comments are now back on the Bad Mojo Mask entry, as well as on the site news. Whatever the problem was, it looks like it might have been only temporary.

WoW Insider Contest: Win Character Art!


My post last week about immortalizing your character with custom character art grabbed the attention of one Jay "Mig!" Mcleod. Jay's an artist who often does custom character art on eBay-- he offered me a nice sketch, but then I figured, why keep his talent for myself-- why not give it away to one of you, loyal readers?

So that's exactly what we're going to do. Thanks to my selflessness, one lucky WoW Insider reader is going to be getting hooked up with a free 8x10 pen and ink sketch (valued at $30) from Jay "Mig" Mcleod. That's his art up above, and you can check out his online gallery for more samples of his work (I've put a few more after the jump as well).

Entering is as easy as we could possibly make it. Just reply to this post with a comment sometime between now and 24 hours from now (contest ends 12:01 am Eastern on Wednesday, August 23rd), and we'll randomly choose one of the commenters below to win a custom made 8x10 pen and ink Mig! sketch of the character of your choice. Make sure to enter with a real email that you can check, because that's how we'll be contacting you. And once we contact you, we'll ask you to send a few screenshots of your character to Jay so he can know what to draw. Don't bother entering more than once-- we'll be watching, and anyone who comments more than once will be automatically disqualified. Tomorrow night, we'll randomly Need roll one of the comments (with /roll, of course-- this is WoW Insider), and we'll post the winner's custom character art when Jay's finished making it.

Good luck!

Update: Time's up, comments closed. We'll be emailing the winner, so be sure to check your inboxes, and when we get the art done, we'll post it here for all to see. And don't worry if you didn't win-- I'm sure Mig! would be more than happy to draw your character for you-- for a small fee, of course. Thanks to everyone who entered!

Continue reading WoW Insider Contest: Win Character Art!

Comments back up and running

Hello readers,

Sorry for the technical difficulties over the long weekend; however, I'm happy to report that things should be performing more the way you'd expect them to now. Comments are back up and running. I just did a test one on another post.

Thanks for bearing with us. More content to come soon...


RESOURCES

Class Columns
Pimp My Profile (1)
(Druid) Shifting Perspectives (40)
(Hunter) Big Red Kitty (33)
(Hunter) Scattered Shots (14)
(Mage) Arcane Brilliance (35)
(Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It (47)
(Priest) Spiritual Guidance (20)
(Rogue) Encrypted Text (33)
(Shaman) Totem Talk (44)
(Warlock) Blood Pact (26)
(Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors (48)
Gameplay
(Arena PvP) Blood Sport (22)
(BG PvP) The Art of War(craft) (21)
(Casual) WoW, Casually (17)
(Engineering) Hoof and Horn Research and Development (17)
(Guild Leadership) Officers' Quarters (55)
(Professions) Insider Trader (56)
(Raid Healing) Raid Rx (17)
(Raiding) Raiding 101 (2)
(Raiding) Ready Check (19)
(Roleplaying) All the World's a Stage (36)
Hybrid Theory (13)
AddOns and UI
AddOn Spotlight (79)
Macro Anatomy (12)
Reader UI of the Week (25)
Reader WoWspace of the week (28)
The Creamy GUI Center (11)
Lore and Stories
Around Azeroth (472)
Barrens Chat (2)
Know your Lore (51)
Tales from the Lion's Pride Inn (14)
WoW Moviewatch (466)
Features
15 Minutes of Fame (18)
About the Bloggers (24)
Ask WoW Insider (55)
Azeroth Security Advisor (1)
Back In The Day (3)
Breakfast topics (675)
Build Shop (34)
Gamers on the Street (19)
Guildwatch (76)
He Said She Said (4)
It came from the Blog (25)
Phat Loot Phriday (86)
Two Bosses Enter (61)
Well Fed Buff (22)
World of WarCrafts (19)
WoW Insider Show (52)
WoW Rookie (36)
[1.Local] (6)
Classes
Death Knight (54)
Druid (264)
Hunter (252)
Mage (156)
Paladin (266)
Priest (219)
Rogue (160)
Shaman (245)
Warlock (172)
Warrior (182)
News
Account Security (10)
AddOns (231)
Analysis / Opinion (2697)
Blizzard (1472)
BlizzCon (184)
Bugs (212)
Burning Crusade (358)
Contests (204)
Economy (183)
Events (366)
Expansions (562)
Fan stuff (821)
Features (606)
Forums (244)
Guilds (461)
Hardware (25)
Humor (723)
Interviews (136)
Lore (265)
Mounts (128)
News items (1403)
NPCs (186)
Odds and ends (1591)
Patches (1112)
Podcasting (73)
Ranking (50)
Realm News (274)
Realm Status (226)
RP (159)
Rumors (32)
Virtual selves (612)
WoW Insider Business (278)
WoW Social Conventions (135)
WoW TCG (49)
Wrath of the Lich King (262)
Strategy
Alts (85)
Arena (167)
Battlegrounds (104)
Bosses (311)
Buffs (114)
Cheats (67)
Classes (285)
Enchants (30)
Factions (146)
Guides (324)
How-tos (362)
Instances (614)
Items (791)
Leveling (246)
Making money (164)
PvP (691)
Quests (342)
Raiding (670)
Talents (120)
Tips (541)
Tricks (215)
Walkthroughs (74)
Media
Comics (63)
Fan art (34)
Galleries (136)
Machinima (541)
Podcasts (52)
Polls (55)
Screenshots (610)
Races
Alliance (103)
Draenei (61)
Dwarves (15)
Gnomes (39)
Human (15)
Night Elves (42)
Horde (102)
Blood Elves (68)
Orcs (25)
Tauren (42)
Trolls (22)
Undead (21)
Professions
Alchemy (75)
Blacksmithing (55)
Cooking (66)
Enchanting (71)
Engineering (106)
First Aid (16)
Fishing (57)
Herbalism (44)
Inscription (10)
Jewelcrafting (78)
Leatherworking (58)
Mining (42)
Skinning (27)
Tailoring (63)
Retired
Azeroth Interrupted (24)
World Wide WoW (8)
/silly (14)

RSS NEWSFEEDS

Powered by Blogsmith

    Featured Galleries

    Magisters' Terrace walkthrough
    Patch 2.4 Sunwell Isle
    Kil'jaeden loot
    It came from the Blog: Mother's Day Event
    It came from the Blog: Children's Week Gallery
    Children's Week: Stormwind
    Children's Week: Orgrimmar
    M'uru loot
    Children's Week: Dornaa's quests

     

    Most Commented On (30 days)

    Recent Comments

    Weblogs, Inc. Network

    Other Weblogs Inc. Network blogs you might be interested in: