Archive for August, 2008
Blizzard offers wallpapers/ringtones, just not to the USA
If you look up “epic fail” in the dictionary, you’ll see such things as blinking into High King accidentally or speccing fire just for A’lar. Blizzard put up a web site for mobile users: http://mobile.blizzard.com which offers mobile users ringtones and wallpapers based on Blizzard games.
First of all, Blizzard is VERY late to the game. As far back as I can remember, people have been putting up ringtones and wallpapers on their cell phones, even if they hack the phones to do it. I had to go through extremes just to get a wallpaper on my Motorola T720 years ago.
Today it’s as simple as putting a wallpaper on your memory stick (Sony Ericsson), or adding it to your photo library (iPhone). Ringtones may be a little more tricky on iPhones, but the Sony Ericsson supports ringtones of almost any kind (MP3, WAV, MP4) that come directly from the memory stick.
So why would people pay for wallpapers and ringtones nowadays? Back when you used to hack your phone to customize it, it was because your carrier forced you to do it (I’m looking at YOU, Verizon). That was the reason why I terminated my contract early with Verizon in the first place. They crippled their branded phones to force you to go through their store to customize your phone, whereas the exact same phone on another carrier like Cingular wouldn’t have such restrictions.
What’s worse for Blizzard is that they don’t support the United States. AT ALL. Don’t they understand that by not supporting the USA, they’re going to seed the idea in people’s heads about how to do it for free? Those few people that would rather pay $1.99 for something are now going to find free ways to do so.
If a company with popular frachises like Blizzard is going to go into the mobile arena, they have to support their largest markets.
Blizzcon lottery emails going out
Several people are reporting that they’ve received winning lottery notifcations for the Blizzcon ticket lottery, including Shawn Coons from How I WoW. Check your emails!
World Of Warcast makes the grade on alltop.com
For those of you that don’t know, alltop.com is a site that aggregates news of a certain category and places the top sites in a list for people to browse through. For World Of Warcraft, our site made the list.
http://world-of-warcraft.alltop.com/ (scroll to the bottom)
Episode 68 is up
Starman’s going to Blizzcon
Starman goes mage horde. Again.
Coming back to the game after a break
Competitor’s Tabards
Blizzcon
Recruit-A-Friend
Wrath of the Lich King:
- Glyphs (Inscribing)
- Hunter Pets
Newbie Tips
iTunes or Direct Link
3,000 more Blizzcon tickets coming via lottery
After the problems Blizzard had with their ticketing system, Blizzard President Mike Morhaime personally apologized for the problems with their web site and said that Blizzard will be offering up 3,000 more Blizzcon tickets by reevaluating their floor space at the convention hall. The tickets will be offered up via lottery to players that had a working Blizzard account as of the time the tickets became sold out (August 12, 2008, 9PM PST).
Click here to read Mike Morhaime’s post.
There are a lot of good people that didn’t get tickets and I’m not keen on lottery systems, but I think that this is an excellent move on Blizzard’s part. I hope that some of the people in my guild that didn’t get tickets can get a ticket now. I also know of people that made travel plans with the assumption from previous Blizzcons that tickets wouldn’t be this hard to get. I hope they get in also.
Blizzcon store errors cause epic fail
This year has to be one of the most anticipated Blizzcons ever. Not only will there be a playable version of Wrath of the Lich King, but we’ll more than likely see the WotLK opening cinematic, but we’ll more than likely get updates on Starcraft II and Diablo III.
With all this anticipation, many people tried to get tickets on August 11 when the Blizzard Store started selling tickets. Nobody was able to get tickets, and the store had become slow, then started spitting out errors just as people were confirming their purchases, and then the site went dead altogether.
Blizzard announced that nobody had been able to buy tickets when the store opened and that it would be brought up as soon as possible. In what was probably the biggest spammng of “refresh” in the history of the internet, people kept trying the Blizzard Store, hoping to get their tickets before people realized that the store was back up.
Slowly, the site came back up, and went back down. Over and over again, the store teased people into believing that tickets were available, only to pull the rug out from under them. People were finally reporting that they were able to buy tickets and got their confirmation emails. Other people reported clicking the last button they had to, only to be brought to the Murloc Error Page, leaving the user to try again.
This is where the story takes a nasty turn. Those people that did try again found that they were charged multiple times for their purchases. What this means was that the store’s server marked the transaction complete, but returned an error to the user. The user would naturally believe that the transaction didn’t go through and tried again. One person even reported being charged 30 times for a total of $3000!
The problems didn’t end there. Towards the end of the afternoon, people found they had 1 or more tickets in their cart, they go to check out, and get an error that the tickets were no longer in their cart and that there were no more tickets available. Ticket sites like ticketmaster.com will “hold” the tickets for you for a few minutes. I’ve seen it average at 3 minutes. This reserves those seats for you for that session for three minutes and the tickets stay in your cart for that time. With the Blizzard Store, even though the tickets were in your cart, they weren’t held for your sessions like ticketmaster.com does. Needless to say, this caused a lot of people to complain that Blizzard shouldn’t have done that, and I would have to agree with that feeling. If something’s in your cart, the electronic store shouldn’t take the items away from you on a whim.
Afterwards, Blizzard announced that there was still a block of tickets left and will be sold at 8PM PST. Were these “reserve” tickets from the multiple transactions people saw earlier? I haven’t found any evidence to say whether or not they were. The server went down about 2 minutes before, and came back up about 1 minute after the hour. Some people were able to snag tickets, others saw the tickets in their cart disappear as the tickets were listed as “sold out” again.
This leads me to the conclusion that Blizzard should not have handled the ticketing themselves. It should have been handed off to a system that has the capability of handling this kind of scenario. Don’t think for a minute that ticketmaster.com couldn’t have handled it. When thousands of people are trying to snag Springsteen tickets in the NJ/NY area and the site manages to do reasonably well, 12,000 Blizzcon tickets would have been a joke to the ticketmaster servers. I would have gladly paid an extra $5 for a ticket if it meant a smoother transaction for myself and others involved.
I hope in the future that Blizzard does a better job at handling this kind of scenario. Several good people from my raiding guild aren’t going because of this mess and it’s a shame because they’re some of the best players in the game.
It’s time Blizzard gave us better management tools in WoW
Everquest. There, I said it. If there’s one thing that Sony has over Blizzard is that it went through the trouble of giving their players some wonderful tools for managing their characters and the people they interact with. I don’t play EQ2 as much as I used to, but I miss the tools quite a bit and I wish Blizzard would get around to implementing some or all of the ones listed below. With Wrath of the Lich King around the corner, I believe it’s time for Blizzard to finally give us some of the tools that in my opinion, should have been offered at least a year or two ago.
Instant Messaging with players in and out of the game
This is huge, and SOE gave us EQIM around 2001. It’s an application that runs under Windows and allows people to talk to guild members and friends in-game. This means you don’t need to have the entire game loaded just to talk to people, and it saves the people in-game from having to load a chat client on their machine.
For Everquest 2, SOE made the chat web-based.
Cross-server communication
This has been a staple of EQ, EQ2, and Star Wars Galaxies for many years. Not only can you communicate with people in other realms of the game you’re playing, but you can talk to people in other games!
Integrated Web Browser
Sony introduced this with Everquest 2 last year. Type /browser and you get a browser. It’s as simple as that. No alt-tabbing required. A great idea would be if Blizzard could perhaps allow direct linking between items and their own database for extended information. It wouldn’t have to bring up a whole browser, maybe the equivalent of a popup window.
Quest history
Ever share a quest with someone and the game replies back “Bob has completed that quest”? So why can’t Blizzard give the users the ability to look at which quests we did? Everquest 2 not only lists the quests you have, but gives you 75 quest slots, the date you did them, categories, the date you got the quest, and every completed quest you ever did. This would be a great way to see if you completed a group quest before going out to do it with friends.
Better guild management tools
Everquest 2 simply kicks ass in this. EQ2′s guild management tools tells you exactly what every member of your guild has done, and you can choose what to see and what not to see. It shows who dinged, what achievements they got, what epic drops they looted, when they level up a tradeskill (which doesn’t happen as often in WoW, it’s like getting an adventure level), and other things.
Better ‘looking for guild’ tools
In EQ2, guilds that are looking for new members don’t spam channels, they simply advertise on the Looking For Guild networkand are do a writeup of what exactly their looking for, what kind of guild they are, and who to contact.
Better auction house searches
EQ2 allows you to search by item type, stat, class, level range, rarity, and price.
I realize that Blizzard is keeping itself busy with their new expansion, but hopefully they’ll find some way to incorporate these changes into WoW soon. It’s been almost four years now and these changes really don’t seem that difficult to implement and it would save so much traffic on the General and Trade channels.
