Project Lore

The barrier has finally come down.  Blizzard has admitted defeat.  The company is now selling WoW gold.

/me reads the rest of the announcement.

Oh, that kind of gold.  Like the Activision-Blizzard merger, Blizzard has simply taken my breath away with its latest business venture.  In an effort to expand the World of Warcraft brand to as many people as possible, Blizzard will begin selling collectible coins.  Yes, thanks to DC Unlimied the extended universe has branched out to the QVC lover in all of us.

Starting June 23, players, and coin collectors, will be able to get their mitts on two Collectible coin sets.  If you guessed an Alliance version and a Horde version, you'd be correct.  Dare I ask which faction has the better collectible set?

Each set comprises of three coins of differing sizes plated in precious metals (that means the coins are just wrapped in the precious metal).  The set will feature various faction leaders set in a fancy box and topped off with a faction emblem.

Alliance coins:
Gold: Varian Wrynn
Silver: Magni Bronzebeard
Copper: Tyrande Whisperwind

Horde coins:
Gold: Thrall
Silver: Sylvanas Windrunner
Copper: Cairne Bloodhoof

Does it need to be said that this strikes me as incredibly odd?  Sure, we use gold, silver and copper coins in the game, but I...I don't know.  Collecting coins just isn't my thing.  They are right up there with stamps and commemorative Elvis plates.  I'll stick with my vast collection of slowly corroding retro games, thank you very much.

The only thing that doesn't surprise me is the continued neglect to gnomes and trolls.  The two factions should really just splinter off and make a new faction called "Emo."  I doubt anyone would even realize that they'd left.

Not my cup of tea, but I am sure the sets will sell out anyways.  Even if they are "on sale" for $59.99.

*Note* I realize this happened last week, but I just came across it.

During this week's raid, an odd thing happened.  Something that has never happened in my entire MMOG career.  The event was shocking enough to leave me speechless.  Literally.  In the middle of our run through the Military Wing of Naxxramas, the Ventrilo server kicked the bucket. For those of you who may not know, Ventrilo is a popular voice chat application that many players and guilds utilize for communicating while playing WoW, among other games. Once the raid realized that the issue was guild-wide rather than personal, the chiding set in. "Looks like someone forgot to pay the bill." "The economy is so bad that even the Ventrilo hosting companies are laying people off!" "This guild can't kill Sarth + 3D or even keep their Ventrilo up?!  I am outta here," followed by a joke /gquit. The server went down during the early trash of our second wing of the night.  After a slight pause to let the Warlock admin reboot the box, we moved on.  We were at pre-Instructor Razuvious trash, so no worries.  Who wipes on trash, right?  I don't know if it was the distraction, the need to type again or random chance, but we nearly had our first - and what would have been our only - wipe on the second to last pack of Death Knight Cavaliers.  The raid pulled out of the lengthy skirmish with a healer standing and a few DPS.  Thankfully, things shaped up after that. Once the initial excitement and near wipes dissipated, an unusual calm set in.  Macros were patched together in haste for boss fights, tanking and stun rotations were set way in advance to compensate for the inability to voice our directions (Yes, I know WoW has built-in voice support now, but I don't know a soul who uses it).  The adaptations allowed us to continue on for the night, but holy crap was it an entirely different experience. I and many other guildies never realized how boring a raid would be without the pointless banter.  No more mom/girlfriend jokes to distract us during trash.  No more lore quips about Thaddius and how he is composed of women and children.  And political/religious chat?  Who the hell would want to type all of that stuff out?  None of my guildies, that's for sure.  Normally the GM has trouble shutting people up, but Ventrilo goes down and even text-based conversation drops to a minimum.  Damn, I should have done /tumbleweed.  I am sure that would have got a few laughs. Have you ever had to suffer through a Ventrilo-less guild raid?  It is one thing to be a part of in a PUG (and usually, you are smarter for not signing on that Vent).  But when you aren't conversing with people you know, the game certainly loses some of that social aspect.  It was one of those eye opening experiences.  You will never realize how much you enjoy Ventrilo until it is randomly absent.

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