World of Warcraft Blog

We’re more than a little surprised that there’s so little talk around these parts about the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game. After all, players who’ve been around the gaming scene for very many years tend to have dabbled in card games like . WoW itself would be a very different creation without the influence of games like MTG and the games that inspired it — so let’s talk about WoW’s own collectible card game!

WoW.com is accepting article submissions from experienced WoW TCG players. What does it take to get started? What’s the gameplay like? How do the loot cards tie in, and what’s been available so far? Is the game part of the tournament scene? Your article will give readers who’ve never played WoW TCG a peek into the game and the world of card games.

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Thanks for reading Call for Submissions: All about WoW TCG at the world of warcraft blog

© 2010 World of Warcraft Blog

Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas — and just as we don’t want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm.

WoW may be both massive and multiplayer, but many of us play it like a single-player game with chat channels. In fact, there are quite a few people who use guild chat and whispers as chat rooms, getting very little playing done during some sessions. And some of us like to either play or chat, but not both. Playing without an invisibility option can be troublesome for those who tend toward hermitism. Hermitness? Hermitacity! Oh, let’s just get to the letter.

Dear Drama Mamas,

As a RL introvert, I find it very hard to make friends and feel happiest when I’m on my own. (I went through several years of high school without so much as a single friend and was very happy that way!) But online is very, very different. I find it easy to be myself in guild and general chat and so on, and as a result I attract a lot of friends.

Because of this, often when I login, three to five people will whisper me at once, each expecting to carry a full-on conversation with me.

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Thanks for reading Drama Mamas: The case of the friendly hermit at the world of warcraft blog

© 2010 World of Warcraft Blog

Welcome back to Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Good news, everyone. We’ve had such a good time with The Queue that we’re not restricting it to just Monday through Friday anymore! If all goes well, you’ll see another edition of The Queue on Saturdays and Sunday, too! Cool, right?

bui asked:

“Are there any creepy critters now that the world has been torn asunder? What made me think about the critters, you ask? Earlier today, there was a spider crawling on my face.”

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Thanks for reading The Queue: Spiders are gross at the world of warcraft blog

© 2010 World of Warcraft Blog

UPDATE: The Escapist has posted the full text of their interview with Ghostcrawler, so I’ve replaced the “abridged” version with the actual exchange instead.

Those of you who’ve played other MMOs (Cataclysm content patch, avoiding the type of situation you see above.

Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street about Cataclysm, and this exchange took place:

Ghostcrawler:
A very simple thing we’ve done is just put on your character panel what phase you’re in. So that you can look and be like “Oh, so the reason I can’t see you is because we’re in different phases.” Long-term, we’re trying to work on a system where you can actually go back and forward a little bit. You might be able to scale your character down levels in order to go play with a friend, and even redo quests that you’ve done before.

Part of the reason we’re able to do that is because of the technology we originally developed for heirloom items, which are items that scale. And then for the Cataclysm expansion, we’ve changed spells, so they also scale with level. So instead of having ranks now, your fireball will just get more powerful as you gain levels. So since you can scale both class spells and items really easily, now we think we can actually let you lower your level down if you want to play with somebody else.

I kinda wanted to have that for Cataclysm launch, but it’s a feature we’re working on.

Jeff Funk:
So do you think that’s saying that, like cross-server dungeons, it might be patched in before the next expansion?

Ghostcrawler:
Yeah. I mean, we gotta get this one out the door first to know how much we need to do for the patches that come afterwards, but it’s definitely in the long-term plan.

We hadn’t heard anything about this feature before, but it sounds great — this way, you can play with a lowbie friend without drastically reducing his experience gain, and you’ll always have something to do together. Heck, it could even pave the way for making old raids relevant again. I’m excited to see how this plays out!