How a guild of deaf players conquered World of Warcraft's toughest raids

Joseph Antle has raided World of Warcraft for a long time. His first guild was called Blackguard in vanilla, and he carved his way through Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, and Ahn’Qiraj with his trusty Tauren hunter. “I can’t recall if I was any good back then, but I have a memory of accidentally pulling Hakkar and wiping the entire group,” he says. “The team wasn’t too pleased with me, but I got over it.”
                 

You can’t understate the coordination demanded by high-tier Warcraft raids. You and 24 friends are the only things standing in front of a boss deemed too difficult for the vast majority of the player base. Each encounter cycles through four or five central mechanics that need to be handled perfectly. If you do something dumb, like forget you’re the living bomb, or stumble through the Flame Wreath, or accidentally aggro the Blood God Hakkar, you’re looking at a long walk back from the graveyard.

Most serious raiding guilds use voice chat to bark orders or refine strategy between wipes. In an age of Discord, built-in microphones, and automatic audio channels, connecting with your fellow players outside the chat box is easier than ever. But Antle is deaf, and wasn’t afforded the luxury of coordinating over voice comms. He still plucked ultra-rare loot off of Warcraft’s fiercest horrors, but his experience was far more isolated—the only guy in the group left out of all the jokes.

A small community of deaf players who knew each other outside WoW formed the Undaunted guild (known until recently as Durus Veritas) in the spring of 2011. All of them had experience raiding, and wanted to use their skills to clear high-end Warcraft encounters without voice chat. And they were successful, progressing through the stringent demands of Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor. On January 15, 2017, they cleared the Emerald Nightmare on the highest difficulty—the first major raid of the Legion cycle.

Antle was recruited into Undaunted in 2013 by a close friend who needed a DPS for their alternative 10-man team. Today he’s guild master, playing a Blood Elf protection paladin.

World of Warcraft to be the only game featured in Californian exhibit on world-changing tech

The Computer History Museum in California, USA, will be featuring Blizzard's long-running MMO, World of Warcraft, in an exhibit based around software that's changed the world. It will be the only game featured.
             

The 'Make Software: Change the World' exhibition "explores the impact of software on the lives of people everywhere, through seven game-changing applications", says the official site.

Visitors will be taught about the creators of the tech, as well as learn about the users whose lives have been impacted by their release.

As well as World of Warcraft, the exhibit features interactive displays and multimedia information blasts on technology such as car crash simulations, Photoshop, MRI, MP3s, Wikipedia and texting.

"Gaming has been a major part of computing and has pushed many of its technical developments forward," says the official overview from 2012, via Gamasutra. "MMORPGs are a major commercial venture, of which [World of Warcraft] is the most successful, and take up massive amounts of time for a large number of people."

Make Software: Change the World is due to open on January 28, 2017, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

A Research Paper Shows Deep Connection Between Norse Mythology And WoW

World of Warcraft is backed with rich lore contents which undoubtedly entices most of the community. Today, a research paper highlights the deep connection and influence of Norse mythology in the World of Warcraft universe and how the two fantasies are somewhat "parallel" from each other.
             

Let's start off by defining Norse. Norsemen are considered as the full-time seafarers and traders during the Viking Age which are of the same kin as the Vikings themselves. The only main difference was the occupation of the two. While the Norsemen were seafarers and full-time traders, the Vikings were the farmers and are also warriors by "noble birth." (they are also known to be good at sailing).
Norsemen are famous for their Norse Mythology which encompasses the culture of the tribe and how they perceive the world as it once was. Just like how rich their culture was, World of Warcraft has taken the inspiration in developing a profound lore into their world which we all relish today. And a student has now taken an in-depth research about the parallelism between Norse Mythology and World of Warcraft universe.

The connection between Norse Mythology and World of Warcraft may run deep but just like any other context that uses reference, Blizzard distorted and/or incorporated twists for some characters to create an entirely new figure in the WoW universe. Here is a list of some:

Yggdrasil is also known as the World Tree in Norse Mythology.
Magni Bronzebeard is the mix between three Norse characters namely: Magni, Modi and Brokkr
Thorim is related to Thor in Norse Mythology
Thrall has a lot of resemblance to the character Njal in the Njal Saga
Aside from characters, there are also connections between Norse Weaponry and WoW Artifacts in the game. According to the researcher, here's some of the artifacts in the game that has some implications from Norse:

Tirion with the Ashbringer
Varian with the Shalamayne
Arthas with the Frostmourne
Morgrainne with the Corrupted Ashbringer

If you want to learn more about the entire story behind the characters and weapons, you can simply check out the unfinished research here. What do you think of the connections between Norse Mythology and World of Warcraft? Share your thoughts in the comments down below!

Why raiding is so expensive in World of Warcraft: Legion

Players who do raids, mythic dungeons and other high-end PvE activities in World of Warcraft may have noticed the high cost of flasks, potions and consumables in the Legion expansion. While the Warlords of Draenor equivalents of these items cost almost nothing, a Legion flask can cost over 1,500 gold on many servers’ auction houses.
               

I’ve written in the past about the player economy in WoW, and what’s been going on with alchemy in Legion is interesting. Here’s what’s going on and why it’s happening.

THE PRICE OF ENTRY

First, let’s talk about why this is a really big deal.

Warcraft’s PvE content is challenging, especially as you get into the higher difficulty levels of raids and mythic dungeons. This content is designed around the assumption that players will use everything available to them in the game to augment their characters and maximize the amount of damage they can deal, tank or heal off.

TIME IS MONEY, FRIEND!

There are four main herbs in Legion: Aethril, Fjarnskaggl, Dreamleaf and Foxflower. There’s also a special plant called Starlight Rose. Each of the regular herbs grows in a different region of the Broken Isles, and the roses grow exclusively in the max-level region of Suramar.

There are four kinds of flasks: one to increase stamina, one to increase agility, one to increase intellect and one to increase strength. Each flask has a different recipe, but all of them require 20 normal herbs — ten each of two kinds — and seven roses.

While you can harvest as many as seven normal herbs from a single node, you can only get one Starlight Rose from each spawn. Unless you have the highest skill level for collecting roses, which requires a lot of grinding, you have a chance for your attempt to pick the rose to fail. This outcome leaves you with worthless dust.

World of Warcraft director Tom Chilton steps down to lead a new Blizzard project

It’s the end of the Chilton era for World of Warcraft.
 

After a decade of overseeing one of the biggest games ever made, World of Warcraft director Tom Chilton is leaving. The designer announced in a blog today that he is stepping down from the lead role on Blizzard’s massively multiplayer online role-playing game now that Legion, the latest (and greatest) expansion has launched. But Chilton isn’t done at Blizzard. He revealed that he is sticking with the company and is now working on something new. The director worked on Warcraft since 2004, and he was key to turning it into one of the most popular and lucrative hits in the history of the $99.6 billion gaming industry.

“It’s with a mix of excitement, sadness, and gratitude that I’m saying farewell to the WOW team and moving on to a new adventure within Blizzard,” Chilton wrote in a message on the Blizzard forums. “My personal journey working on WOW as Game Director is at an end, but my journey with Blizzard isn’t. I’ll still be here, but will be focusing on another project within the company.”

World of Warcraft was long Blizzard’s crown jewel, but it is entering the twilight of its life. It peaked in 2010 with 12 million subscribers, and it has since dwindled to less than half of that — although the publisher no longer releases the figures for how many people pay for a monthly membership. WOW still generates millions of dollars in revenue every month, but fans have still wondered whether Blizzard would replace it with something new. The studio was working on a new MMO called Titan, but it eventually canceled that project and repurposed many of the assets and ideas for the popular Overwatch shooter that launched in April.