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GW2 Servers Being Pounded

August 25, 2012 by

It’s less than 12 hours into the 3-day early access for those who pre-purchased Guild Wars 2, and it’s fair to say that if the amount of server downtime being experienced is an indication of game popularity, then this is going to be one popular game.

Since 2pm AEST when the servers came up, there have been intermittent issues with being able to log in, and these appear to have worsened this evening. Some are getting angry but it’s pretty par for the course for any MMO launch and things will pan out over coming hours.

And anyway: imagine what it’ll be like when the full launch occurs….

Over to you: how has your experience been with the game so far?

[Pic courtesy of businessinsider.com]

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2, Servers

Guild Wars 2: 3-Day Headstart Launches

August 25, 2012 by

For those who pre-purchased GW2, access to the game started at 2pm today AEST, a little ahead of the 5pm formal start as the servers opened up.

I jumped in pretty much from the start and as expected, was greeted with rather a large crowd of toons:

Lag has been minimal given the server loads, so kudos to ArenaNet there. There are some queues but that’s to be expected as well.

Other key bits of info for oceanic players to keep in mind:

Unofficial Oceanic Server: Sea of Sorrows
Unofficial secondary oceanic server: Gate of Madness
Guild Wars 2 Server List: here
Guild Wars 2 Guilds List: here
Guild Wars Oceanic Facebook Page: here

Over to you: tell those without the early access how you’re finding the game!

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With:

SWTOR Space Combat Popularity: Some Stats

August 24, 2012 by

For those who play space missions in SWTOR, there was an interesting snippet of information released by BioWare in the past day.

In response to a forum thread on how many people actually play space missions, Allison Berryman responded with this:

To address the question in the title of this thread, I talked to Jonathan Crow, a Gameplay Telemetry Analyst here. The data that we have shows that nearly half of all currently active players have played at least one Space Combat Mission in the past 30 days.

So there you go – I’d expected the numbers to be a little lower than that.

Over to you: did you realise so many people played space missions? Did you actually think the stats would be higher? Let us know.

Filed Under: General News, PvE, SWTOR Tagged With:

Oceanic Gamer Forums Get a Revamp

August 24, 2012 by

Ok, revamp is probably too strong a word, but we’ve updated the forums to match the wider focus of the site.

There are now sub-forums for Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World in addition to SWTOR. We haven’t created a WoW forum because of there being so many out there, though if you think it’s worth doing, we’re more than happy to do so.

So why would you use these forums?

– to advertise a guild event
– to let people know if your guild is recruiting
– start a discussion on something you love or hate about the game
– throw a brickbat or bouquet at us for a story we’ve run on the site
– just have a chat

Forums are pretty old-school but they still have their place, so do consider jumping in. Any forum relies on a critical mass of contributors – we’d love one of them to be you!

As always – let us know if you have any suggestions for the forums and if we can we’ll make the changes.

Filed Under: General News, TOG News Tagged With:

Oceanic Soap Box: Guild Wars 2 Eve

August 24, 2012 by

This week it’s a bit hard to ignore the huge MMO launch on our doorstep. Guild Wars 2 launches for some tomorrow afternoon, and for the rest three days after that. So let’s make that the topic for debate this week.

Will you be jumping into GW2 at launch? Will you be playing it at all and if not, why not?

For mine, I’ll be there Saturday afternoon to check things out and to start levelling but for me GW2 is going to be a casual thing. Something I jump in and enjoy once a week or so.

What about you?

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2, Suggestion Box Tagged With:

One Quest for Guild Wars 2 Glory

August 23, 2012 by

It’s only three days until those with 3-day headstart access will start playing GW2, and I know a bunch of people are getting pretty excited.

One in particular is Victoria-based Hayden, who has set up Condescend Gaming. He’ll be doing some serious streaming of his early days and weeks in GW2. If like me you won’t have 14+ hours a day to level up, you may be interested in seeing someone else having a go.

I threw some questions at Hayden to get an idea of what he has planned:

Tell us a little about how you got into streaming your play time

Got into streaming about 2-3 months ago while playing SWTOR. A friend on my server was a streamer and I had never heard of such a thing. Once I found out what it was, it instantly became something I was interested in and wanted to be a part of.

How long have you been playing MMOs?

WoW was the first MMO I ever played back in 04/05. I instantly fell in love with MMOs from the first time I logged on. Although I did quit and come back a lot over the following years, I still kept a high standard of competitiveness – landing Gladiator in Season 4 and Alliance first ICC 10man Heroic kill on our server (server 2nd) to name a couple.

After deciding to quit WoW for good a few weeks after Cataclysm was released, I have been searching for a new MMO ever since. Have tried Rift and TERA for a short time but it didn’t cut it for me. SWTOR was a game I thought had a lot of potential, but was rushed in it release and collapsed on itself soon after. I think GW2 is finally the MMO I am looking for to play long term.

Why are you excited about GW2 in particular?

The main fact that it is a brand new MMO. I have been searching and waiting for an MMO to grab me and keep me interested. I thought SWTOR was that game but I was highly mistaken. Guild Wars 2 seems to have so many new and appealing features that I can’t wait to play through.

You’re intending to go flat out to level up in GW2 – what’s your strategy and how long do you think it’ll take you?

I have 5-6 days off where I will be playing a minimum of 14+ hour days. Oceanic 1st 80 is something that I have in mind and will definitely be pushing to achieve this. I have read that someone in BETA did it in ~88 hours, so I think I would be able to achieve this in a similar time. Just have to stay focused and not get distracted. Remember the goals that have been set in place and strive to achieve them.

Plug time: where can people follow your stream?

I currently stream from twitch, a link can be found here twitch.tv/condescendgaming

Also be sure to follow me on Twitter and YouTube for the latest updates:

twitter.com/condescendau

youtube.com/CondescendGaming

I want to thank everyone at The Oceanic Gamer for this opportunity and the hard work that has been put into their website. There are constant news updates and articles which makes a good read and easy to keep up to scratch with all that is going on.

And here’s a quick promo vid that our esteemed oceanic colleague has created to showcase his intentions:

Over to you: how full-on will you be levelling in GW2?

Filed Under: Events, General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With: ,

SWTOR 1.3.6 Patch Notes

August 22, 2012 by

After last night’s maintenance we have a new patch: 1.3.6. There quite a bundle of fixes in this one, which you can check out in full below. And in case you didn’t realise, the Chevin world event is now over.

Enjoy the patch notes:

1.3.6 Patch Notes

8/21/2012

General

  • After a player uses the “Reset Local Phases” option, they now must wait 30 minutes to use it again, increased from the prior wait time of 2 minutes.

Companion Characters

Xalek

    • Many of Xalek’s personal conversations can now be had in Cantinas as intended.

Flashpoints and Operations

General

    • Using combat revive abilities now consistently returns the revived player to combat if an encounter is still active.
    • Non-boss enemies no longer occasionally respawn after an Operation group has been defeated and re-enters the Operation.

Group Finder

  • Pre-made groups of four players that queue for Group Finder now correctly receive daily mission credit.
  • The “Travel Now” dialog no longer fires more frequently than intended.
  • Players now receive an error when attempting to manually add a new group member while queued in Group Finder.

Items (Items and Economy)

  • Several Imperial head slot items that were not displayed correctly on female with body type 3 have been corrected.
  • Several head slot items now have text that correctly displays in Aurebesh.
  • Many hoods that previously stretched or clipped have been corrected.
  • Players can no longer modify an item while they are looting the contents of a reverse engineered item.

Missions and NPCs

Missions

Balmorra
        • Trash to Treasure: Multiple OT-15 Prototypes no longer spawn at once.
Quesh
        • Quesh Showdown: Master Berin Fraal can no longer be knocked into the acid pits.

Class Missions

Jedi Knight
        • Anarachy: Colonel Hareth no longer respawns after being defeated.
        • Doomsday: The map for this mission’s area no longer reverts to being unexplored as the player leaves the area.
Jedi Consular
        • Pilgrims: Master Yuon Par no longer disappears after speaking with the player’s character.
Imperial Agent
        • Darth Zhorrid Arrives: The conversation with Darth Zhorrid no longer triggers again automatically if the player uses Esc to cancel the dialogue.
        • The Master Stratagem: The conversation with Keeper no longer triggers again automatically if the player uses Esc to cancel the dialogue.
Trooper
        • Climbing the Ladder: Jonas now correctly responds to player choices.
Bounty Hunter
      • Garoya be Haran: the conversation with Torian Cadera can no longer be repeated.
      • Target Rich Environment: Redivivus now correctly draws his shotgun.

PvP

General

    • Corrected an issue that prevented players from receiving the correct rewards when a Warzone match was completed very quickly.
    • Warzone Information is once again displayed in the Warzone interface.

Miscellaneous Bug Fixes

  • Female Sith Purebloods’ fourth jewelry option now displays correctly in-game.
  • Female Sith Purebloods’ fourth hairstyle no longer clips with the character model.
  • Combat Training Targets MK-2, 3, and 4 now appear correctly on Dromund Kaas and Coruscant.
Filed Under: General News, Patch Notes, SWTOR Tagged With:

EA Announce ‘First Game Play Tour’ of Australia

August 22, 2012 by

EA Australia have announced an “Australian” tour showcasing their new and upcoming games. I put the “Australian” in quotation marks because in reality it’s three cities on the east coast. For people who can get to the locations, it could be a bit of fun though.

It’s being held at the following places:

  • VIC – Westfield Fountain Gate, Melbourne – Thursday 6 to Sunday 9 September, 2012
  • VIC – Highpoint Shopping Centre, Melbourne – Thursday 13 to Sunday 16 September, 2012
  • NSW – Westfield East Gardens – Thursday 20 to Sunday 23 September, 2012
  • NSW – Westfield Parramatta – Tuesday 25 to Sunday 30 September, 2012
  • QLD – Westfield Carindale – Thursday 11 to Sunday 14 October, 2012

The games you’ll be able to have a closer look at include: EA SPORTS FIFA 13, Need for Speed™ Most Wanted, Medal of Honor™ Warfighter, Dead Space™3, Crysis®3 and more. The “more” is interesting in that we don’t know if any MMOs like SWTOR and TSW will be available to play – we’ve put in a query to EA and will let you know.

Over to you: will you turn up to have a gander?

Filed Under: General News Tagged With:

Through The Mist: Patch 5.04 In-Depth

August 22, 2012 by

Through the Mist is a regular column from Luke Le Page covering everything World of Warcraft. If you’d like something covered in a future column, drop us a line!

With patch 5.04 just around the corner, I thought it would be good time to take a look at some of the changes that are taking place before the launch of Mists of Pandaria. The patch notes can be seen below and as you can see there are some major changes coming.

Perhaps the most exciting part is the pre expansion world event involving Theramore. This looks to be an exceptional event. Personally I have elected not to go on the PTR to test it so that I can fully enjoy it when it goes live.

The change that will have the greatest impact on gameplay is obviously the changes to talents and I encourage everyone who intends to play to check it out beforehand so you can get an idea on what talents you want to take.

I have also included the update, which can be found below the patch notes, that details how currency is going to be dealt with.

Apart from the major gameplay changes such as talents, there are a number of excellent Interface changes. The queuing system has undergone a much needed overhaul and all queue types can now be accessed from a single menu.

The removal of ranged and relic slots has been a fairly contentious issue throughout the beta and for hunters it means that their ranged weapon will now fill the “weapon” slot and no other weapons are usable. As a Rogue I am obviously a fan of any change that stops Hunters rolling on Agility-based weapons!

Theramore of old – we will miss you!

It is also important to note that with this patch, all of the races in World of Warcraft will be available to players no matter what level of access they have. The Pandaren however will remain locked until the official launch of Mists of Pandaria and then become available to all players. The Monk class will only be available to people with access to the expansion. I have yet to find any details on whether this will be the same for Death Knights (with Wrath of the Lich King access) or not.

My personal favourite in regards to the changes is account-wide achievements. I played extensively in classic and the Burning Crusade on my Paladin, it was not until very late in the Burning Crusade that I elected to change mains for guild purposes and so I do not have any classic raiding reputations at exalted. With this change all of the work I did on my Paladin can be transported across to my Rogue and I will be rewarded with a huge increase in Achievement points to display on my main. While this by no means affects gameplay in any way it is a nice gesture from Blizzard and enables people who have changed mains for whatever reasons, or simply altoholics to have all of their work displayed in one place. (An interruption from the Editor here: WOOT!!)

We also see an increase in the number of character slots. You can find the details in this interview with Tom Chilton. The character slot response is at about 1:20 mark of the video.

The patch notes:

Patch 5.04

Welcome to the World of Warcraft Patch 5.0.4 Public Test Realm. We thank you for testing Patch 5.0.4 with us, and ask that you participate in our PTR Feedback forum and our PTR Bug Report forum.

Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Please note that PTR testing is restricted to World of Warcraft game accounts that do not have access to the Mists of Pandaria beta test. You can find more information on this here.

General

  • Account-wide Achievements, pets, and mounts
    • In Patch 5.0.4 and beyond, the majority of your character’s Achievements, pets, and mounts will be shared with your other characters. Please read: Bringing Achievements to the Account Level, by Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street

 

  • World Event: Attack on Theramore Isle
    • Warchief Garrosh, obsessed with assuring the Horde’s supremacy over Kalimdor, launches an all-out attack against Jaina’s island home of Theramore. Though valiant Alliance defenders rush to repel the sudden onslaught, they’ll soon find themselves unprepared for the terrible scope of Garrosh’s true plans…
    • In the Public Test Realm, we will be testing this event at specified intervals. Keep an eye on our PTR Feedback forum for more details as they become available.

 

  • AOE Looting
    • Area of effect looting comes to World of Warcraft with this patch. After killing a group of enemies in close proximity, when you loot one of their corpses, the loot window will include items from all of the nearby corpses for which you have loot rights.

 

  • BattleTagsupport in World of Warcraft
    • Players who have enabled their BattleTagwill now be able to:
      • See BattleTag friends in your friends list.
      • Add and remove BattleTag friends.
      • Send BattleTag invites to other players via right-click.

Classes

  • All classes have been updated with a new talent system, improved abilities, and spells (accessible throughout levels 1-85). Your character’s talents have been reset.
    • Many old talents have been converted to specialization abilities.
    • Druids now have access to a fourth class specialization: Guardian.
    • New spells are now learned automatically. Class trainers are only needed to change talents, glyphs, class specialization, or to utilize the dual specialization feature.
    • All characters now take 30% less damage from other players.

Currency Conversion

  • Coming soon.

Items

  • Spell Penetration has been replaced by PvP Power on existing items.
  • Head enchants removed
    • Enchants that modify the gear in your head slot have been removed from the game. This includes older head enchants of every type.

 

  • Relics, ranged, and thrown items
    • The slot in which ranged, relics, and thrown items were previously equipped has been removed. All weapons should now be equipped in the weapon slot.
    • Ranged weapons, including wands, have been adjusted to be more powerful.
    • Ranged weapons no longer have a minimum range.

Professions

  • The glyph system has been updated. Many class glyphs have been added, altered, or moved to different glyph types.
  • Prime glyphs have been removed.

User Interface

  • There is a new user interface for your mounts and pets.
  • Character creation screens have been updated.
  • Buffs have been consolidated in the UI.
  • New roll results frame added. This new feature can be accessed by clicking the word “[Loot]” in chat, or by typing “/loot”.
  • The PvE queue frames have been unified. You can now queue for dungeons, raids, and other queue-able content in one handy place.
  • Vendors now offer item filtering.
  • Spellbooks have been updated to reflect changes to core abilities, and now include a brief overview of specializations.
  • The Dungeon Journal has been expanded with information on all pre-Cataclysm encounters.
  • A new help system has been added to many frames. You can toggle this on and off by clicking the “i” button in the upper left corner of the frame.

 

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

The currency conversion coming with Mists of Pandaria is going to happen in three stages, and this is how we plan for it to progress:

With Patch 5.0.4 on August 28

  • Valor points will be converted to Justice points, and Conquest points will be converted to Honor points.
    • Neither of the resultant currencies (Justice and Honor) will have an enforced hard-cap at this time.

 

  • The current Arena season will end.
  • Players will no longer be able to earn Valor or Conquest points (bosses will drop Justice, Arenas will be closed).
  • Items formerly purchasable for Valor/Conquest will be available for Justice/Honor.

With Mists of Pandaria on September 25

  • Valor can be earned again.
    • Characters can earn up to 1000 Valor per week, and carry a maximum of 3000 Valor.
    • Daily quests, random Scenarios, random Heroic dungeons, and all levels of raiding will reward Valor.
    • Valor will be used to purchase ilvl 489 gear in Mists of Pandaria.
      • The Klaxxi, Golden Lotus, Shado-Pan, and August Celestials factions will sell this gear.
      • Revered reputation with each faction will be required.
  • Conquest will become earnable.
    • There is a cap of 4000 Conquest points.
    • Arenas and Rated Battlegrounds reward Conquest.
    • It will be used to purchase ilvl 483 gear from Pandaren battlemasters on the Great Wall.

With Mists of Pandaria, Patch 5.1

  • We currently plan to upgrade the Valor system as Ghostcrawler described in Mists of Pandaria Looting Explained in the 5.1 patch, allowing you to upgrade your gear using Valor points. We’ll have additional information once Mists of Pandaria launches and we get closer to the 5.1 patch release.

Do you have questions or comments about currencies in World of Warcraft? Please let us know in this discussion thread.

 

Filed Under: General News, Patch Notes, WoW Tagged With:

SWTOR Server Downtime: August 21st 2012

August 21, 2012 by

A standard four hour maintenance downtime for SWTOR tonight. If you want something SWTOR-related to do while you’re waiting, don’t forget to check out the latest episode of our podcast!

The time conversions:

AEST: 5pm-9pm

AWST: 3pm-7pm

NZST: 7pm-11pm

Bioware’s blurb:

 

Hello everyone, we wanted to let you know that we will be performing scheduled maintenance for four hours on Tuesday, August 21st, 2012 from 2AM CDT (12AM PDT/3AM EDT/8AM BST/9AM CEST/5PM AEST) until 6AM CDT (4AM PDT/7AM EDT/12PM BST/1PM CEST/9PM AEST). All game servers will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than four hours, but could be extended.

This maintenance is done in order to make general improvements and to check performance of the game so that we can continue to provide a consistent, quality experience. Quite often (but not always) after a maintenance period there will be a patch to download. After the maintenance, please login via the launcher to download the latest patch. If your launcher was open during the maintenance, you must close and reopen it for a fresh login.

Scheduled Maintenance

Date: Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

Time: 2AM CDT (12AM PDT/3AM EDT/8AM BST/9AM CEST/5PM AEST) until 6AM CDT (4AM PDT/7AM EDT/12PM BST/1PM CEST/9PM AEST)

All game servers will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than four hours.

Thank you for your patience as we maintain service for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™.

Filed Under: General News, Servers, SWTOR Tagged With:

GW2 Oceanic Guild Spotlight: Brigade Of Light And Dark

August 20, 2012 by

If you’d like your guild spotlighted, just use our contact form to let us know. Or if you like, respond to the questions shown below and send them in – we love to profile guilds and the work they’re doing. The only requirement is that you’re an active oceanic guild. Please be patient if you don’t hear back from us immediately – we will only be spotlighting a guild every week or so.

Name of guild

Brigade of Light and Dark (BOLD)

Guild website

http://brigade-of-light-and-dark.shivtr.com/
– our old GW1 website…a new one may be on the horizon…..

History of your guild’s name?

Brigade of Light and Dark (BOLD) was originally formed by our guild leader Ptolia Arter in GW1. The name inspired by “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

What sort of guild are you?

This is a very relaxed guild who maintains “fun” as a priority – winning is, of course, fun.  Many members are returning Guild Wars players and have already pre-purchased GW2, looking to give us that head-start access.  We are looking to dominate Yak’s Bend, but members will in no way be limited to that one server. Could make for some fun in WvW though.

Some may say “international” is a fairly broad term and can complicate guild events. However,  our time-zone differences (ranging anywhere from the Americas, Europe and Oceania) are too weak of a barrier to keep us from hosting constant guild events!   Not only that, we also feel that through an international guild comes international friendships, cultures, constant members online, and success.

Most importantly, our guild focuses on learning; always trying new things, excelling, and then teaching others.  Knowledge is only real if shared (the saying was something like that). Try visiting our website:  “BOLD is not a guild that objects to answering questions – no matter how “silly” or “noobish” you might think they are.”  – Ptolia Arter (Guild Leader)

Have key guild members been involved in other games / MMOs?

Mostly GW1 but also LOTRO, Rappelz, and other MMOs

How many guild members do you have at the moment?

25 – 30 coming in at release or very soon after

What days/times do you see the guild being most active?

With being an international Guild we envisage having members online for most of the day/night

What are the achievements that your guild is most proud of?

Several members including our GL have attained 50/50 pts in Hall of Monuments and also GWAMM (God Walking Among Mere Mortals – the highest title in GW1)

You have one minute to convince someone they should be in your guild – what would you say to them?

We are a guild that has always enjoyed “Going Hard Out” in-game then kicking back with a party and some fun guild events, either in the Guild Hall or the world of Tyria

What are your predictions for the next 6 months for the guild?

We are all looking to get into GW2 and level our main characters asap while reuniting with old friends and making many more. We are looking to quickly grow BOLD into a 50 – 100 member friendly, family orientated guild for all ages and experiences.

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2, Guilds Tagged With: ,

Through The Mist: World of Warcraft Pet Battles

August 20, 2012 by

Through the Mist is a regular column from Luke Le Page covering everything World of Warcraft. If you’d like something covered in a future column, drop us a line!

This week I logged in to take a look at the new pet battle system coming with Mists of Pandaria. Prior to logging in I was not particularly looking forward to this feature and it was something I looked at as a time waster while waiting for queues to pop and raids to form. However, I was pleasantly surprised with the feature. As I mentioned a few weeks ago in my overview of the major changes Pet battles does not offer us anything ground breaking in terms of new MMO technology or gameplay, it is simply a mini-game that is extremely fun.

To enable the feature we need to learn about pet battles from Varzok in Orgrimmar. He can be found near the flight master.

Once we have learnt the ability we now have to find some critters to fight. We can do this via our mini map – attackable critters appear as a paw on our mini maps and are spread generously throughout the world:

To attack on these critters we simply click on them. We begin the battle with just 1 pet slot and can unlock more as we progress through levels. At level 5 we receive our 3rd slot and can then queue to fight other players, though we can challenge players to a pet duel at any level in person.

As our pets progress in level, they unlock new skills and eventually we can capture the critters that we are fighting. Each pet has 4 stats: Health, Power, Speed, and Quality.  Health, Power and Speed increase as your pets level up.  Quality designates the overall strength of your pet’s stats and will vary on every pet that you catch.

We also have the option to rename each of our pets individually – this is helpful as we can capture multiple types of one pet as we battle across Azeroth. It also allowed me to officially rename my Panda from the original collector’s edition to the name by which I have been referring to it for years.

As mentioned above there is nothing mind blowing about this new feature, it is in fact very much like the classic Pokémon games from the Nintendo Gameboy. It is highly addictive and a lot of fun to play and after having played it on the Beta I have spent close to 5,000 gold on pets on the live realm, ready to be levelled as  soon as the feature is released.

Filed Under: General News, Opinion, WoW Tagged With: ,
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