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Posts with tag guild-wars

April Fool's is upon us


Yes, it's only midnight, and already the wackiness has started. These people just couldn't wait to do something a little silly on the first day of April.
More to come for sure. Don't believe anything you read today (unless you read it here on WoW Insider, of course).

Making the PvE-PvP break

There's been quite a bit of talk about the PvE vs. the PvP game lately -- with Arena PvP basically dictating the changes to drinking and Lifetap, and Mortal Strike-like abilities also taking center stage (which are almost useless in PvE), Blizzard's plan of having the same characters in PvE and PvP seems to be backfiring on them. They originally wanted to let you use all the abilities and techniques that you use in PvE in PvP as well, but reader Raul recently sent us a comment that more and more players might agree with: it's time Arena PvP became its own game, and Blizzard split the two up for good.

This is the case in Guild Wars -- when you roll a character in that game, you choose it for PvP or PvE, and there are certain things you can only do with each. And even Blizzard is heading this way, believe it or not: with the debut of the Arena realm this weekend, some players are already clamboring for characters that they only play Arena with 24/7.

Are we really ready to split the game into World of Warcraft and Warcraft Arena? There will no doubt be a lot of players who want to continue to play their characters in both PvE and PvP, balance be damned. But if Blizzard is as committed as they seem to be to balance Arena as precisely as it needs to be balanced to turn it into a real e-sport, they may have to eventually make the jump and separate the two games completely.

Switchblade updates to version 3.0

We've covered Switchblade before (and even posted an impressions and interview about it), so odds are you've probably at least heard of the program, which allows you to play WoW and other PC games with a wired (or wireless with adapter) Xbox 360 controller. Blue Orb recently sent word that they updated the app to version 3.0, and along with the update came not only support for Guild Wars and Hellgate: London, but updates to the way WoW controls.

There are now presets that come with the program for each class, so the priest preset will play different from the warrior preset, and so on. The release notes also say that there is a "key capture" feature -- just press a key to bind it -- and there is also a number of "combo" and "game actions" features. You've got to be careful when running programs that line up sets of actions for you, however; we know from experience that Blizzard sometimes walks a fine line when using inputs that allow macros.

Switchblade is now available as a free download (the program itself is ad-supported) and an Xbox 360 controller (as well as downloadable software drivers from Microsoft) is required to use it.

WoW Xfire hours played drops 18 percent in September

Gamesindustry.biz is reporting a huge drop in /played time over the past month for World of Warcraft players. From August to September, Xfire users played WoW 18 percent less than the previous month.

But it's likely not necessarily because of the oft-delayed 2.2.2-- the drop is probably just the difference between students out of school and in school. Over the summer, students were obviously able to play a lot more with all the freetime they had, but as school starts up again in September, there's more homework and less rep grinding to do. Still, 18 percent is a huge drop-- while school starting up is definitely a big part of it, I wouldn't be surprised if the slowdown in patch releases (even though it's since picked back up again) also had a hand in it.

Though it can't be that big a difference-- both Guild Wars and Silkroad Online (the other two big MMO titles on Xfire) saw similar drops. It'll be interesting to see what happens next month. I wonder if Brewfest (and soon, Hallow's End and 2.3) was able to convince students to take their homework breaks in Azeroth.

[ via Incgamers ]


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