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Posts with tag noncombat-pets

Children's Week begins today

Today's the first day of May, and that means that Children's Week has begun. All kinds of little snot-nosed orphans are out there begging for you to run them around Azeroth and show them the sights, and in return they'll give you one of the richest treasures in all of WoW -- a cute little noncombat pet. There's a nice Children's Week guide up over at WarcraftPets, and we've done our share of orphan touristing around here at WoW Insider. This year will be no exception -- stay tuned all week for posts about what may have changed in Azeroth for the holiday, and don't forget that this Sunday, our in-game guild on Zangarmarsh will be running around the orphans all together.

Of course, it may not be the best thing for Azerothian orphans to be running around with all you wacky player characters, but they've got to get out of the orphanage at some point, right? Go do it for the kids this week!

Breakfast Topic: Collectibles

As I was perusing the very first review of Grand Theft Auto 4 yesterday, I noted that the "collectibles" in that game are going to be pretty intriguing. While a lot of collectible items in games (say, all the packages in the previous GTA games, or the flags in Assassin's Creed) are fairly superfluous, I find that some (like the orbs in Crackdown and the billboards and jumps in Burnout Paradise) actually make the game more fun -- while traveling through the game world, you can keep an eye out for extra stuff to do and see.

World of Warcraft has never really jumped in on that idea, however. Obviously, there are plenty of collecting quests, but usually they're for killing mobs. And there are plenty of things to collect in the game -- noncombat pets, tabards, and mounts, and so on -- but none of them really give you a reward when you find a certain number of them, or give you bonuses based on how many you've picked up.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? For me, hiding some fun, optional collectibles (and giving small rewards based on just finding them) in a world as lush as Azeroth would make exploring an already great environment better. But I'm sure some would see it as a cheap tactic to make people hunt for widgets. What do you think?

Silver tabbies as far as the eye can see

Thanks to tipster Enaress, we have a short video of an amusing (albeit potentially annoying) exploit ingame that allows you to summon an unlimited number of noncombat pets. From the date on the video, it looks as if this has been live since at least patch 2.3.0,and a few of the commenters have successfully tried it for themselves. A note of warning: be careful if you do this, as dropping out of sync with Blizzard's servers can definitely be considered an exploit, and, at Blizzard's discretion, could get you banned from the game. Odds are a fix is already en route.

I have to admit, I was amused at the prospect of having my small army of pets out and about, but from what Enaress has observed, doing this does have a tendency to contribute to the lag in Shattrath (which seems to be especially noticeable with complicated pets like Lil' Smoky). I don't think I'd try it for myself; Shatt can be bad enough during server high time. But there's something about the notion of my Druid as a dedicated cat-herder or, say, an Undead being followed by a swarm of cockroaches, that just made me laugh.

One more thing; would the Disgusting Oozeling's aura stack, you think?

Gallery: Infinite pets bug

A swarm is afoot.A circle of lightsAn army of fireflies.A serious bug.

New toys for Engineers


Amanda M. had a tiny mention of this in her big Engineering post earlier, but I felt it deserved another mention. Our friend Boubouille at MMO Champion has discovered that there are new toy models coming for Engineers in 2.3: a rocket chicken (yes, really), a paper gyrocopter and a paper zepplin, and this crazy model above, a dragon kite.

Now, I don't mean to rain on Engineers' parades-- they definitely deserve all the love they're getting, and I can't wait to see all the cool stuff they're making out there on the realms. But here's the thing: wasn't the whole problem with Engineering that they were stuck making toys instead of useful items? The Epic Mount is awesome, but is anyone else surprised to see that an "Engineering revamp" includes papercraft toys? This is just more Mechanical Squirrels, which is what Engineers were disappointed with in the first place.

An unweighted Companion Cube would be hilarious (Portal has my game of the year vote right now, until I get to check out Mass Effect). But I thought the whole point of beefing up Engineering was to get past these pets. Will letting them do some papercraft really bring the profession up to speed?

Update: Or maybe they're not all for Engineers. The Rocket Chicken certain seems like Engineering, but there's speculation floating around, according to our illustrious commenter Kyle, that these are rewards from the new Upper Deck loot cards.


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