145 – The Instance: Randydeluxe And Ding Pong Go To Northrend

Changes Are A’Blowin’ On The Wind
Since we last talked about such things, Blizzard posted patch 3.1.2 on the Public Test Realms for for players to beta-test… giving us a good idea of what is coming when Blizzard next updates WoW in a couple of weeks. This is the patch that promises to bring:
 * The Outfit Manager we’ve been talking about.
 * In 3.1.2, Vehicle health and damage output in Strand of the Ancients and Lake Wintergrasp will scale with the item level of the operator’s gear.
 * The Lake Wintergrasp daily quests will change to weekly quests. You should get more honor and stone keepers’ shards at turn in, but….
 * A lot of other stuff.

There’s Something Happening Here
What it is – aint’ exactly clear. There’s a man taking down apps over there, telling me web comics got to beware. We can’t help but notice the series of actions that have been presumably taken by Activision-Blizzard over the last few weeks as an assertion of their sole use of their intellectual property. When we last talked about this, it was Activision-Blizzard insisting that authors of WoW addons not ask for compensation for their work. Over the last week or so, there appears to have been a shift into a lot of new territory: Dear Community, dear fans, certainly some of you will have already noticed that we took down our comic strip. The reason is that the legal department of Activision/Blizzard expressed objection that Shakes & Fidget could aim itself too negatively at world of Warcraft and could injure their copyright. We do not agree with these objections, but rather hold Shakes & Fidget to be a legitimate parody on fantasy cliche. Nevertheless we have stated our objection and taken the comic strip offline, we plan to revise the strip and in the course of the time to publish again. We will continue to discuss this with Activision/Blizzard and hope that also the presently inaccessible comic can be placed online soon again.
 * iPhone apps are disappearing. We first read about this at dblbbl.com ten days ago, where that blogger noticed that two apps had disappeared from the iTunes store: Warcraft Chest and WoW Realm Status, following the cease and desist received by Warcraft Characters a few weeks ago.
 * What happened with the German web comic? Scott is nervous. The comic is called Shakes And Fidget, and like so many web comics inspired by World Of Warcraft, it pokes fun at typical WoW-related experiences we all have. This past week, the creators of Shakes And Fidget took their entire comic down, and posted a message to their readers in German. We’ve had it translated into English, and it goes something like this:

They Give You Prizes….. For Playing A Game
We’re talking about the TCG and Minis games. It’s that time of year again — With a prize pool of over $360,000 worldwide, Realm Championships are the destination of choice for World of Warcraft Trading Card Game and Miniatures Game players on May 16 and 17. Prizes include Spectral Tiger Loot cards, $2,500 travel vouchers, electronics (such as iPod Touches and PlayStation 3s), and a host of other goodies. If you haven’t qualified for the Realm Championships, there are plenty of prizes available in the Realm Open, which is open to all comers. For more information and the location of a Realm Championship near you, visit the Organized Play info page.

Town Cryer
Verethrine of the Uther realm writes: I hear all kinds of talk about level 19 and 29 twinking but never any other levels. Are the other levels (39, 49, 59, 69, 79) not viable for twinking or are 19 and 29 just the most popular?

Unis on the Kael’thas server wrote: I have seen alot or arena videos on youtube and i was wondering if you know the name of the addon that tell when the other person is almost dead or when you or your partner uses a trinket and when you have low mana or health? We decided to take a mulligan on this question and put it out there for the community. What do you think are the best mods for an arena player to utilize?

And The Drop Of The Week Is…. Us.
Have we ever done that? Well let’s try something completely different. This week’s drop of the week is a blog post that we wrote and published just this week, and that we think you might find so useful – that we’re going to practically beg you to read it. The subject? Getting yourself tickets to Blizzcon 2009.