sprite

the second hates the idea that someone gets something that took them hours and hours of play time to get.

Seems to mirror those who object to people having a level 44 green cloak on their back with a HWL Spellblade, doesn't it

Game are packing my order now apparently, and I'm inclined to believe it after seeing what The-G said there. Collector's Edition, too.

I think that only them and Gamestation (Sorry I meant to write Gameplay here ><) really had a realistic estimate of how many they might get - HMV were taking pre-orders for the CE until a ridiculously late date so it's no surprise that most people are being disappointed. Gameplay stopped taking them within 3 days or something silly.

Anyway, games in shops is good. And Jo Public who may not be playing WoW already (remember, they are opening new servers too) will see all the insane advertising and think, "hmmmm..." and then spend on both the original and the expansion.

Aaaaannnnd... having a retail box gives Blizz something to charge for. We've had plenty of new content in the past through downloadable patches - if the expansion were entirely online/downloadable, people would be like "well, hang on a second, why am I paying for this? It's no different to x number of patches in one"

And oh yes the Blink Bug COMPLETELY does my head in!!

A friend transferred from Kul'Tiras to Draenor and claimed it was like heaven in terms of bots or lack thereof :S

In fact, I don't know why sprite's ignore list is full

It's because so many people hate me and send me abuse every day otherwise

Nah seriously, I right click, ignore a lot of the whisperers, bit pointless though since they delete themselves, but just to prevent more spam in the next 30 seconds I guess.

It's just the inconvenience of it, why pay £9 a month to have any sort of inconvenience, or are we setting out standards too high?

Should we just accept that we can't farm for our Spell Power Enchants at certain times? Are we not allowed to feel entitled to do what we want, when we want, within the 'rules', considering we pay for that entitlement? You can't deny that losing that entitlement to a programmed bot pretty much sucks.

It's someone else to add to a full-up ignore list (not that it does any good, lol), and it's not just *a* whisper these days. It's the same message about 10 times completely filling the allocated writing space each time.

It's annoying, ffs! It's not like "Oh gnoes, my world is crumbling", but it just pisses people off and can spam other things off the screen etc.

Meh, I dont give 2 shits if someone buys or sells gold. It doesnt bother me.....The only thing that annoys me about it is....

Then you do care. People don't really care if someone wants to spend cash on gold, it's their money. They care about how it disrupts their personal game as a knock-on-effect.

It made some things attainable and do-able that I wouldnt have been able to do otherwise.

Don't you think though that raiding Naxxramas *should* require a lot more time/effort/dedication than ZG? That in order to get the best of the best, you really need dedication toward the goal?

At least TBC opens up a lot more content to the casual gamer, on an equal playing field with those who play 18 hours a day. Because I do agree that there wasn't enough to do for these guys before, and buying gold allows them to see more/do more.

Fair enough using an Action Replay to get 10,000 gil in FFVII, the only person you cheat is yourself. The trouble with cheating in WoW is that it really pisses off other people. Not that you do it, but that their game is less enjoyable/more difficult as a result.

And i know u apparently "need" gold to raid every night of your life but no one actually makes you raid do they? You raid of your own free will and if you cant support that choice via the time you spend in game you should raid less.

Precisely. If you can't support such a Wow-lifestyle then you shouldn't have one, that's the way Blizz intended it. On Kay I raided so much so never had time to really grind, except to pick my dreamfoils whilst a friend worked on say Elemental Fire and we put our pickings together for me make pots for us both. Worked great. So I never went above 100g except for when we farmed MC or BWL for cash etc.

"But I work full time and have a family and study at nights and want to kill Kel'Thuzad!!!" - can you really do all these? Without affecting at least one?

Anyway, IMO:

Buy gold if you don't care about the fact that you are helping to ruin the economy (both by supporting farmers and having too much wealth so buying lots of things mebbe ), lining the pockets of Giashdioamd and co spamming Org every day, or that others on your server can't grind their Essence of Fire because people like you actively think it's ok for the few mobs that drop these things to be decimated and unavailable to the non-gold-buying player.

But don't expect to have many friends if you tell them you did. Would someone lend you hard-earned mats for an enchant if they knew you bought gold? Doubt it. (Would you care? Doubt it! Off to www.buywowgoldagainyay.com!)

And I'm sure you'd get sick of WoW quickly if you bought gold to achieve all your goals.

<Controversial post inc>

As a person who works full-time I am able to understand why people do it. Yes, you can grind, and spend hours doing it, etc etc, and the people who do that will make you think you are copping out or whatever, being a huge nolifer by buying gold etc etc.

A huge WoW nolifer, perhaps. The orcs and trolls will look down on you for sure. But in Real Life terms you are cutting down the time you need to spend on a goal significantly.

But then you can just say... well.. WoW caters for so many different 'tiers' of player. It will always be the ones with the most time, or at least most time they are willing to spend on WoW, who raid on the cutting edge.

Those who play 2 hours a day take ages to ding 60 and their goals are never as high, or Blizzard never intended them to be, at least. An epic mount maybe the peak of this sort of player's game.

Buying gold lets you skip into the bits that Blizz intended people to spend more time on... and you will get moaned at etc for it because those people spend that time and effort, and it's not fair to do that when others just cba. Your play time should determine how far you get in-game...

Your time is effectively trivialised, if you did it the 'hard' way. How much do you value your time? £20 an hour? 500g an hour?

But which ever way you look at it - gold buyers/farmers are ruining the enjoyment of many people. It's horrible trying to farm the Essence of Water for your enchant when 5 Ni Hao types are doing it. Not to mention the million spams a day from GHaiasidjajidjieghghi in /General and whispers. My ignore list is full

And it's sad if you need to buy gold to continue to enjoy WoW Play Zelda instead!

I've only been level 60 for about a month so haven't been running instances/raids for months and selling all the stuff to earn mega money. The things I've spent my money on are

Raiding is a gold sink rather than a gold earner, to be honest. [Edit: See sithlord's post!!] Yes, you can make 40g in BWL when you are decked out in Tier 2/3, but you are also spending a load on pots/repairs in Naxx or wherever on the other days of the week!

My mage (I keep talking about her, as I made her to be a moneymaker as I always sucked at that on my druid) got an epic mount (bought skill and got the PvP mount itself) a couple of weeks ago, dinging sixty a couple of weeks before that. Quests did earn me a lot of cash, as did farming mats for myself (eg. My spell power enchant was all farmed/transmuted, I only bought the Golden Pearls (2 for 15g!! Bargain )) Seriously.. I went to Tyr's Hand a few days, getting bored after half an hour each time, but making about 50g on a good day through selling the grey crap and runecloth and dissing the greens or selling them if I could...

But yeah, buying mats for things like a Robe of the Void will set you back. And professions too, but now, having invested in enchanting and tailoring, I make a load out of it - making ~55 greens and dissing them and selling the mats. And I do it for other people too, they make stuff with say leatherworking and say "oi! Mage! diss stuff!" and get a lot of Illusion Dust back and I /lol. Although the Large Brilliant Shard from a 53 green was a nice surprise.

Though Blizz do take action against bot's and gold farmers from time to time I have never heard of a player being banned for buying gold

A friend of mine in Finland is quitting WoW after losing a lot of faith in Blizzard - broken servers etc etc but the tip of the iceberg was a close friend of his being banned for buying gold which he never did :-(

Disclaimer time from me too since I'm saying some rather 'objective' things, I suppose. Buying gold sucks. "OMG OMG I FINALLY GOT MY EPIC MOUNT AFTER EIGHT MONTHS!!!! /happy happy joy joy" someone will say. "lols, I bought mine for £20 on eBay eight mins after I dinged" says someone else.

Yes, the game is a huge grind. If you don't enjoy the sense of achievement that you get at these milestones then it's a little sad. If you simply cannot play because you are so poor in game at a given point, (ie. raiding repair bills) nag a friend for a little help! ANYONE can get gold with a couple of hours' worth of effort, seriously.

Err.. except healbot druids and tanks who first need to grind enough to respec to grind some more. Or roll mage alts D:

(if only someone would buy the bloody idol of the moon I've been hawking on the AH for over a month now)

I just specced balance, if only you were on Draenor

Is it even worth taking a chance on?

Heh, wasn't the point I was trying to make, rather suspicious that Blizzard are rather choosey about who they get rid of ^^

Buying gold is a funny thing though. One other forum I frequent has a guy who is determined to batter it into those of us who simply just play WoW that everyone plays is ruining their life completely by wasting hours upon hours on it, etc etc. He'd cite gold buying as being the lowest of the low. I couldn't help countering him by asking what he thought of them effectively giving up the grinding hours by doing so

Sure, maybe they can, but do they?

Isn't there some conspiracy theory about how Blizz are in bed with IGE?

As for the goldfarmers, I think the belief/hope that they will one day vanish because Blizz wiped them all out and/or people stopped buying gold completely is a bit misguided. Everyone's fed up of them, but it won't change at all IMO

Maybe I'm just cynical, though

But really, an epic mount is 540g now. My mage has made over.. I dunno, 1.5k gold maybe in her lifetime. A lot of it vanished into levelling ruddy enchanting, mind. I bought an epic mount skill at 810g because I was impatient, and a Freezing Band because I thought (rightly) that it would be rather beneficial.

She's still comfortable though, as is my druid who went down to 13g buying an extra bankslot, whoops! And so the alt supports the main.

(I profited greatly from the PvP surge by selling a lot of Greater Eternals and Large Brilliant Shards which people needed for enchants, turning over 100g a day if I worked at it through dissing things from Tyr's etc)

But questing alone earnt me a lot of cash - my point is, where did all yours go that you can't afford the 540g that it's reduced to now? :|

It had a 2 min cooldown that shared with healing potions before, the slowfall nerf is no biggy really.

No it didn't? :S I'd often chug a Noggen every few seconds as soon as global cooldown allowed, because I always favoured being tiny and got through it so fast to achieve my goal ^^

Why on earth have they nerfed it though?

I can understand why they nerf people's abilities and things, that actually really affects other people, but why nerf something people have for pure enjoyment?

/sigh. I'd get through so much of the stuff clicking off the buff I didn't want and guzzling another, praying for tinyform.

I guess you could argue that the slow fall stuff was too much like a mage's slowfall.. just guzzle it until you got one and fly down to the gold mine in ab

Try calling Gameplay maybe? I'm told they are very nice and helpful, by my somewhat computer-shy relatives who opt to buy gifts from them over the phone

Wooot

I am delighted to let you know that your Preorder for World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Collectors Edition will be with you shortly. The order will be despatched by your chosen delivery method in time to reach you for the morning of release.

Placed the order 16/10/06

Get a mage to chuck a portal in front of their noses. I was skeptical at first until someone told me that a lot of scripts operate with right-clicks, so I went along and used three runes to put a line of portals through em.

Got about five

Sooo... has the saga finally come to an end? I've been on NTL for years now, struggling in the past with crappy ADSL that dropped out a lot when I tried it. Since April, I have got by in WoW, with steadily decreasing performance from my connection.

Huuuuuuuuuge lagspikes, often disconnecting me, inability to play at bossfights like Anub'Rekhan, Suppression Room lol, Thaddius I was a suicide bomber.

Eventually, I decided to give ADSL one last shot. It didn't look great yesterday - my noise was circling the drain at 5.5-6db. I found some tips on another forum which limits the speed my router syncs at, but goes for higher noise - more stability.

So, at 5MB I am connecting slower than the 9MB I got from NTL.

But.

Even Wirelessly, it hasn't dropped once, and my ms in game has gone down by 300ms! (This from a wire before with NTL!) Yippeee!!

Get along to BWL and pickup a Herald of Woe so you can run around Org looking fearsome! Roawr!

I'd be very surprised if it didn't matter... at least, with the original WoW, buying a European Version (ie. with European License) meant you would play on the EU servers and vice versa...

But you have no crit on your mace Gouki I find the HWL Spellblade to be comparable to The End of Dreams so from what you say it sounds like that must be the best option.

If something makes a person slow then it controls them.

What you're looking for is a means of immobilising, well, maybe it's odd, maybe it's not, but if you want to sheep or root people, don't roll a shaman, clearly

I dispute that shamans don't have any form of "Crowd Control" - so maybe they cannot take one target out of action for a given period of time, but they can slow a whole room full of Blackwing Legionnaires.