World of Warcraft

Community is the Reward in an MMO and We’ve Forgotten That

January 10, 2020 Editorials

The year was circa 2002. Ragnarok Online was getting long in the tooth and I was invited into a mystical world that existed only until 2005, which was Dark Age of Camelot. The entire game itself was I would argue harder than Dark Souls. Soloing anything was next to near impossible and leveling required a group and lots of patience. FFXI, while not my cup of tea, was in many ways similar and players have similar opinions. The point of the game, the success, came from community. Building community with like minded players who wanted to sit and chat and play a video game together was your reward. It wasn’t power. It wasn’t fame. It wasn’t prize money. It was friendship, something we’ve long long lost in online gaming. To level, you would have to have a stereotypical archetype group of a tank, healer and DPS. The tank could only…

Monetization is Destroying Gaming YouTube and Gaming Video in General

December 7, 2019 Editorials

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have. Socrates Greed can ruin the nicest of things. We’re going to take a deep dive today in the history of YouTube and video sharing online and how monetization has completely ruined what was once an innocent form of expression and turned motivation away from passion and into greed. There was once a time when watching video on the Internet was difficult and nearly pointless to do, especially around the year 2000. The popular media format was “Real Media” which was a very high compression format that was “dial-up friendly.” You could fit a lot of video in a small file size in a very small resolution. Which, to be fair, 800×600 was the common high resolution display in those days, so a 320×240 video was nearly half the resolution of…

Games Journalism is Evolving Back to the Community

October 31, 2019 Editorials

This is a difficult topic for me because I believe that games journalism is just such a weird thing to begin with. I’ve been writing in this industry now for over 15 years professionally, as in paid to write and it’s still hard for me to even consider myself a journalist. I’ve sourced stories, been featured on TV shows as someone who predicted World of Warcraft going free-to-play and in general have spent most of my time honestly just writing guides and covering games I liked. Here’s the thing, people look at the folks writing about games who do present themselves as journalists and pass some interesting judgements good and bad about their content, but these days it’s actually really hard as a text based site to matter to the marketing companies that are hired by developers and publishers unless you’re the mainstream media. It started back when video was…

Fortnite is a Boon and a Curse in the Evolving Digital Landscape

October 28, 2019 Editorials

Fortnite is an example of a game that can appeal to the masses with ease. The gameplay is simple, over the shoulder FPS that’s simple to play with the only extra mechanic being building. The game updates itself roughly each quarter with some new mechanic or changes within the game and new ever existing plots and stories for players to follow. The ever snowballing amount of cosmetic choices give players the ability to be them within the game, even though millions and millions and millions worldwide are playing. In this current landscape you have two kinds of people out there. The ones who love the game and play it frequently and you have those who resent it, for a myriad of reasons that honestly don’t matter in this context. Both camps have a lot of people in them and both have excellent reasons for their opinions. Looking deeper than on…

5 Tips to Going From Level 1-60 Fast in World of Warcraft Classic – A WoW Leveling Guide

August 27, 2019 Guides

Here’s how you can level quickly.

Don’t Panic at World of Warcraft Classic’s Launch Day Queue

August 26, 2019 Editorials

One of the worst things for something like World of Warcraft: Classic is more servers. If we learned ANYTHING from the days of vanilla, it’s that more servers are not the answer. They’re just not. What happens is the population spreads heavily onto the servers available immediately at launch and then, as new servers come on, people just simply make alts to play the game waiting on the popular servers to cool down to join their friends already there. Since WoW: Classic won’t have cross realm (which didn’t come out until way past vanilla) or phasing or anything like that, there is a real need to keep each servers population high. Right now, there is a major tourist season happening. WoW players are logging in and people are resubscribing at the idea of playing something that by all intentions, most won’t stick with. Which could just be diresome down the…

Best Professions in World of Warcraft Classic – A Professions Tier List of Sorts

August 26, 2019 Guides

Picking a profession can be hard in World of Warcraft: Classic because you lose any recipes you learn if you unlearn a profession meaning it’s more or less a permanent choice. You’ll want to start early as well with some of them, like the gathering professions, which compliment leveling while others you may want to wait on leveling at a later time. We’ve ranked the best professions for everyone, the best to make money with and then what we consider professions you may want to think about before you choose them below. While subjective, I disagree that class based professions is a thing. Just because you’re a warrior doesn’t mean you can’t pick herbs and make potions. Take what compliments your playstyle over what others tell you at the end of the day. A Tier – Best Professions for Everyone Alchemy: Flasks for raids are important and making them is…

It’s Okay to Play World of Warcraft Classic as a Casual

August 26, 2019 Editorials

World of Warcraft Vanilla took a tumultuous time in my life and united a variety of characters who provided a wonderful outlet and escape from reality in a time when that made sense. It also was a less miserable option, not a superior one. Raiding felt like a job and arranging your life to meet the raid times can be hard if you have anything else to do in the world. There wasn’t Netflix or easier entertainment options available like today and everything back then required a lot of money to do. It’s not 2005 or 2006 anymore and we don’t have to look at something like WoW: Classic as a chore or something we need to race to level 60 in to get the best raid guilds. Most WoW players back in the day were casuals, making up most of the players and is why the game evolved into…

Tips for Saving for a Horse/Mount in World of Warcraft Classic

August 25, 2019 Guides

Level 40 in vanilla WoW is known as being sort of the halfway point to level 60 and when you finally can get your mount. The mount costs a total of 100 gold, 80 for the mount and 20 for the training. You’ll need to buy the mount from your racial vendor, unless you’re exalted with that faction (i.e. Humans get horses, need exalted with Darnassus to get tigers, etc.). Best Advice: The first thing is start planning for your mount at level one. Don’t spend anything at all ever. Avoid the auction house except to offload items. There isn’t very much you can buy at lower levels that’s worth the money and other players will gleefully spend their gold. Don’t take a flight path every single time as well. Flights are expensive. If it’s not across the entire continent, just walk! Grinding: Grind while questing. Just farm enemies while…

What to Play in World of Warcraft Classic

August 25, 2019 Guides

Choosing a class can be difficult and leads often to alts because the grind after level twenty becomes rather severe. First you’re going to have to deal with the fact that most classes just suck at solo grinding. Mages have to sit after one or two enemies and drink. Warlocks take awhile to get enough skills and health and gear to be able to pull non-stop and need the Voidwalker pet to really get going. Rogues are a dime a dozen and Warriors are powerhouses at level 60. So we’re going to go through the different classes and why you’d play them and the pitfalls of early game and late game. This guide assumes you know the basics of what the classes are and we are going to keep it brief to help you decide, but not make the decision for you. Truly you should play what you have the…