Last week I announced a really simple little contest to give away a double handful of Blizzard authenticators. All you had to do was leave a comment and let me know what region you’re in and, if you won, give me your physical address so I can send you the authenticator.
I divied up the entries into three regions and drew random names for each region. Without further ado, here are those random winners.
I’ve heard a lot about accounts being hacked lately. I know a lot of players are concerned about it. The more people play WoW, the more potential profit there is in stealing our accounts for nefarious purposes … and the harder the hackers will try to do just that.
In the past few weeks, a lot of people have generously offered to help me keep up with the possibly cataclysmic pet changes in the Cataclysm expansion in whatever way they can.
I’ve also had a couple of quiet e-mails from people who know people who may or may not be in Friends & Family testing, asking what kind of information would be helpful to send to me after the NDA is lifted.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Samuel Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
We’re in the calm before the cataclysmic storm, and like most calms this one is a bit boring.
I had an entirely different post planned for today (crocs FTW!) but then Nethaera went and posted this request for feedback on hunter pets on the WoW hunter forum:
We’re looking to get some feedback on the types of pets that hunters would like to be able to tame and the types of abilities that might be interesting for those pets to have. Is there a type of creature in the game now that you would like to be able to tame or an ability that you’ve always thought should be added? Here’s your chance to share a bit more about what you think could be great additions for the hunter class.
Edit: EU hunters, your version was posted a bit later on the EU Hunter forum.
Needless to say, this is a question near and dear to my heart. I posted a response immediately and I expect you to do the same! In fact, head on over there right now … I’ll wait.
Like many people, I am desperately hoping to get in on Cataclysm testing at some point during the beta. But I realized this morning that just wandering around gawking will not be a good use of my time — I need to be prepared!
(For the record, I plan to do lots of wandering around and gawking anyway. Shoot, my middle name might as well be ‘gawking’. Mania ‘Gawking’ … er … Does Mania even have a last name?)
Anyway, this wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t keep creating new web sites. But nooooo — someone just has to go launching more and more of the damned things. And that means I need to keep them at least nominally up to date.
Oh hey — I have a blog! *cough*
If you’ve been around here awhile, you may remember Kaet — my second character to 70 and my ‘Alliance main’. She’s a dwarf lass with a penchant for those tiny jewels of the hunter world: crabs. For reasons unknown, she has three of the little suckers: a red crab named Tibri, a blue crab named Frore, and a white crab named Niffis.
You may have noticed that I have a small problem with web sites: I seem to be addicted to creating them.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve spent some spare minutes here and there working on a little project called WoW Tabards. As you might expect, WoW Tabards is a visual database of the tabards that you can collect in World of Warcraft. For example, you can see all the tabards from the WoW Trading Card Game or all the Argent Tournament tabards.
You can also create an account and use the site to track your tabard collections on one or more characters. I find this especially useful since there’s no in-game tabard panel (yet) and I’d otherwise have to go digging through my bank every time I wanted to see what I already have. (I have 26 tabards at the moment.)
Now I know there are already sites that let you track your tabard collection — I’m thinking primarily of WoW Collect — but since I prefer Warcraft Pets for my mini-pets and Warcraft Mounts (of course!) for my mounts, I really only needed tabards.
And anyway, once I get an image in my head of what I want, I can’t shake it. And I am moderately proud of the look and feel of WoW Tabards — I think the very simple color layout and color scheme really brings out the colors of the tabards themselves.
(Now if I could just make Warcraft Mounts pretty … )
Today Blizzard posted a preview of changes to the hunter class in the upcoming Cataclysm expansion.
I’m not going to repost the entire thing here (although I did post it on the Petopia forums for those who can’t get to the WoW forums for whatever reason).
But suffice it to say that it is both full of intriguing information … and yet somehow just a tad disappointing. A tasty M&M, if you will, when you are really hungry.
There are no huge surprises here — we’d had hints about most of these changes already — and an awful lot of questions yet unanswered. Of course, questions are to be expected: this is just a preview; not, you know, a systems doc.
So, let’s pull it apart, shall we?
Warcraft Pets, the best WoW mini-pet site on the web, is celebrating its third birthday today!
Warcraft Pets is one of my favorite WoW sites. It combines an adorable but uncluttered look with exceptional functionality. (Check out my mini-pet collection!)
In addition, Warcraft Pets has been an inspiration to me for my own sites, including Warcraft Mounts and WoW Tabards.
I’ve chatted with Breanni, maven of mini-pets, several times and I’m always impressed by the time and effort she puts into her site. I have some conception of how time-consuming running a site can be, but … I am fundamentally lazy.
Breanni isn’t. She serves her community well.
So happy birthday, Warcraft Pets. May you enjoy many, many more!
