I hope everyone who celebrated this weekend had a save and fun filled holiday.
This comic strip was actually brought about by a comment I saw made by a Blue, which one I can't recall as I read the thread it was made in two weeks ago and bookmarked the wrong one. The comment was more or less along the lines of if you want a good thing, don't rush it, and was made in response to people demanding new BGs.
The comic is a result of my being laid up with some sort of crazy bug all last week, and certain medications making me hallucinate. Fun, really, if it weren't for the fact I kept waking up thinking my scanner was talking to me.
See you next week!
Gallery: Barrens Chat
Barrens Chat is a weekly installment of comic insanity from around Azeroth. Barrens Chat is not edible, and swallowing may cause delirium in small children and the elderly. Barrens Chat is not intended to be used as a flotation device, so please use caution around water. If you are feeling like licking your Draenei friend might be a good idea, I'd suggest against it. Instead, come back next week for another comic.
I have played multiple Night Elves over the years I've been playing WoW (which is since open beta). So why did I just notice the face in the wisp a couple weeks ago? It's not like I don't die a lot. I do. I play on PvP servers but am not very good at defending myself, so I'm easy prey. I guess it could be new (doubt it), or it could be my recent graphics card upgrade (which isn't that recent), but I think it's just that I never really paid attention.
I also just noticed that the Timbermaw Hold cave entrances are furbolg heads. Of course, they've been like that since the beginning, but it's new to me.
What things that have been in the game a while are new to you? Or am I just particularly unobservant?
Hello again! This week's strip has been done in memory of Children's Week. That wonderful and joyous celebration that gets you a cute little tag along to play with, all in exchange for running everywhere in the entire world.
I have somehow managed to miss out on Children's Week every year, but knowing my luck, it's for the better! It would likely lead to a catastrophe not unlike what is featured in this comic.
Want to know what kind of catastrophe I'm talking about? Check out the Barrens Chat gallery for this and other comics!
Comedy Central's Indecision 2008 blog is feeling froggy -- after we posted about their failed attempt at World of Warcraft humor, they got the original writer of their article, who is apparently an old school D&D gamer, to respond to our allegations that the piece wasn't funny. He calls us WoW players "Lancelot-come-latelies," and says that before we ever rolled our first Night Elf, he was rolling d20s in his friend's parents' basement.
Which may be true. But he's wrong about one thing: we WoW players are funny. Just look at our memes, our injokes, and our heroes, from Steve to Leeroy Jenkins. We know funny. Tony DiGerolamo probably hasn't even ever tricked somebody into /gquitting -- he wouldn't know funny if it was an epic drop off of Saurfang himself! And he wants to play the nerd card by claiming he's nerdier than us? Listen, Tony, you may have been hanging out with your friends in basements, but we're hanging out in basements alone!
Wait...
At any rate, we hope the excellent Indecision 2008 blog has learned something from this experience: leave the Warcraft humor to those who've powerleveled it up to a 375 skill, and stick to the political jokes. Seriously, though, is Lewis Black hiring? Because I've got some jokes about Warlocks that are comedy gold!
One of the things I sort of miss from my City of Heroes days is the ability to add a description to my character for everyone to see, and having the ability to read their origin stories, too. RP mods such as FlagRSP(now out-of-date) and ImmersionRP work to fill this void, but it isn't quite the same.
Though most players have horrible, awful descriptions detailing nothing but their vampire fangs and heaving bosoms(even the men), they still supply entertainment when I have nothing better to do but stand around Stormwind using guild chat as glorified IRC. The addons that allow you to do this are nice, but they just aren't used by many people, even within the RP community. That's understandable, they don't really 'do' a lot. I don't see something like this ever being implemented in WoW's lifetime, but it would be nice to see, simply for the entertainment factor.
Am I alone in this? Is it so wrong to want to read these things when I have nothing better to do, no matter how horrible most of them are? Does that Night Elf over there really have eight black feathered wings? Does she really?
He Said / She Said is a new feature at WoW Insider, which looks at the game from masculine and feminine points of view. Today, Amanda and David discuss the age-old question: are male night elves and blood elves "gay?" Does Blizzard intend to give us that impression, and if so, why? If that's not what Blizzard intends, then why is gayness such a big deal when people think of elves?
Apparently Blizzard spent some time rebuilding all the player models for Patch 2.4 in order to increase performance. What exactly does this mean to us players who loves the way our characters look? Absolutely nothing. You won't notice any differences in the models at all -- except, that is, if you happen to play a human female. Then you might look deep into your characters eyes and notice a certain "Stepford-wife" look, like a "2000-yard stare," as if her "irises are popping out of her head."
Asariah noticed this and posted his concerns in the Bug Report Forum (did you know there was a Bug Report Forum? neat huh?). Hortus spotted this report and informed us that the human female was the only one of the multiple races to receive a minor alteration from this, and that "it was decided that this was an acceptable change." Apparently someone up there at Blizzard is a big fan of 2000-yard, iris-popping, stepford-wife eyes in women!
For my part, though, I have to get up really close to my human female character to notice the difference -- and then when I do it makes me giggle uncontrollably. It's really no worse, in my opinion, than all those glowy reflections you see in anime girls' eyes. And to be honest, human women have always been a bit vacant-looking in WoW; they're better than human men, of course, but still don't usually look like paragons of profound intelligence. At least they don't bounce up and down like night-elf girls do.
Just had to share this amazing "Tree of Life" wallpaper with you all, as seen on Resto4Life. It was commissioned by them, and done by Andrige, an artist who's created quite a few terrific WoW-related images. But man this is a great piece of work from start to finish, with a little Night Elf treeform backed up by the big Ancients in the background, all covered with that great purple Darnassian glow.
Very cool stuff, and very apt to grace the desktop of any Resto druids out there (or the people who appreciate them -- raises hand). My only complaint is that it's all druid centric -- where are my epic Shaman wallpapers?
Straycat's story of "getting it" reminded me of when I first realized this game was something special. I'd played MMOs before, and I'm a longtime gamer, so I always knew that I'd get into it. But it was during my first group, right around level 7, where three people I'd never met and I did a few quests together, and traveled all over the Night Elf starting area (yeah, yeah) All of us kind of figured out just how great this game was-- even at that early point, we realized how different our classes where, and how much this game really had to offer.
So the question for today is: was there an exact time at which you "got it" too? Lots of WoW players are first-time gamers (at least first-time serious gamers), and there were probably a lot of surprises out there when it was discovered that video games really could be as fun as they say. Was there one point at which you "got it"?
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them, brought to you by Dan O'Halloran and David Bowers.
Some people say that Blizzard is lazy. Players tend to start voicing this sort of opinion when it seems like Blizzard hasn't done something they think should have been done a long time earlier, such as adding new dungeons they won't visit, or new features they won't use. Sometimes there's just one particular thing that grates and grates on the players' nerves so much that they simply cannot understand why Blizzard hasn't done anything about it yet.
Even I have been guilty of this sort of thinking now and then. But ultimately, it becomes apparent that, whatever the status of Blizzard's list of flaws -- laziness is not one of them. Indeed, we simply do not realize the massive extent of work that is required to achieve some things, especially the things we don't personally desire, and therefore fail to give credit for hard work done where we don't realize such credit is due.
The topic at hand today is a prime example of such a problem, a druid pet peeve which has gone on for a long long time. Exhibit A, above, is the Tauren Cat Form, or rather, what some of us might wish the Tauren Cat Form looked like -- a player's own suggestion submitted in Blizzard's own art contest of 2007. The Tauren Cat Form that Horde druids have been seeing since 2004 is pictured to the left here in Exhibit B[Update: Tauren cat form has been slightly updated in patch 2.3]. Whether or not Exhibit A is the perfect replacement for Exhibit B can be left up to the good judgment of the reader, but for the purposes of this article, it is sufficient for us if we all agree that something must eventually be done about the feral druid's monotonous appearance problem. That's to say -- we tire of staring at the Same Old Animal Posterior (or SOAP).
Barrens Chat is a weekly installment of comic insanity from around Azeroth. Barrens Chat is not edible, and swallowing may cause delirium in small children and the elderly. Barrens Chat is not intended to be used as a flotation device, so please use caution around water. If you are feeling like licking your Draenei friend might be a good idea, I'd suggest against it. Instead, come back next week for another comic.
One of the things I sort of miss from my 
He Said / She Said is a new feature at WoW Insider, which looks at the game from masculine and feminine points of view. Today, Amanda and David discuss the age-old question: are male night elves and blood elves "gay?" Does Blizzard intend to give us that impression, and if so, why? If that's not what Blizzard intends, then why is gayness such a big deal when people think of elves?
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