MOGS

The Man of Steel wants to Clash Steel

In an interview with MTV news ¹ Brandon Routh, Superman in Superman Returns, has high hopes for being cast in the upcoming World of Warcraft movie. With Sam Raimi directing the film, the film may finally be fleshing out to a real movie. Hopefully in the next upcoming year we start to hear more actors being cast and possibly a storyline synopsis so this long awaited film can come to light. But until then you can see Brandon Routh as the vegan guitarist, Todd Ingram, in this month’s Scott Pigrim vs. the World ².

1. source: MTV News/  ↩
2. http://www.scottpilgrimthemovie.com/  ↩

TF2 – Engineers Gone WILD

Normally I don’t post about non-mmorpg’s in here, generally if it doesn’t relate to a service we offer I try not to talk about it so things aren’t irrelevant, but with the latest World of Warcraft Expansion – Cataclysm on the horizon I know from experience there are a ton of burned out gamers right now looking for something to burn off some raiding steam with. I mean, there’s only so much you can do to keep things fun when you know something amazing is right around the corner. So without further ado I’ll let you guys know how I’ve been killing my time until the new xpac drops. TF MOTHER%*$# 2!

Team Fortress 2, for those unfortunate souls unaware, is a somewhat addictive Multiplayer FPS created by Valve Software, the same guys who created the ever popular Half-Life series and the ridiculously addicting game that could go by no other name than Portal (The cake is a lie!). On July 8th they have graced us with the Engineer update, which if you have been playing the last few days, in my opinion brings out a whole new level of strategy to the game. They have finally given Engineers some new achievements and toys to play with and wreak havoc with, especially my favorite map CTF_2FORT.

To start we have “The Wrangler“, a pistol replacement that allows an Engineer to take control and aim their sentry gun manually. You might be asking yourself “But Jason, the sentry gun automatically targets and destroys anything in it’s path”, and yeah… you would be right. But does your sentry also create a shield that absorbs 66% of all incoming damage? Does your sentry get a doubled firing rate for all levels and an increased missile launch rate at level 3? Can you hide behind you and your friends 3 beautifully shielded sentries and lay waste to any idiot who dares cross their paths? No? I didn’t think so.

Next we have “The Gunslinger“, a wrench replacement that essentially doubles as two weapons in one. Appearing as a Fist clearly stolen from Darth Vader, The Gunslinger will automatically give +25 health to the wearer. When using it as a melee weapon and bashing that enemy spy or pyro in the face trying to take out your friendly sentries, the third punch in a series will ALWAYS hit the enemy as a crit, deserving of a macro to yell out in general “YOU GOT KNOCKED THE *%$& OUT!”. Now as if that wasn’t awesome enough, it get’s slightly better, but not much. The Gunslinger will also allow the Engineer to build a single Combat Mini-Sentry Gun instead of the standard Sentry. A Mini-sentry only takes 2.5 seconds to build, only costs 100 metal, but it cannot be upgraded or repaired and only deals half of a normal level 1 Sentry Gun’s damage. In essence it’s crappy sentry that you can deploy very quickly to deal minor damage. The only thing holding this back at the moment is the fact that you can only build one mini-sentry. Now that all sentries can be packed up and redeployed I personally just can’t see the benefit of using this equip slot over a wrench. While theoretically it could be useful for setting up choke points, or throwing up a quick mini while you help another engineer get his Dispenser and Level 3 Sentry setup , its low damage output and the fact that most any class can kill it with a couple well placed rounds puts it at a severe disadvantage. It’s great for throwing out a quick offense only for the fact that it requires basically nothing to put down and takes almost no time to deploy. Otherwise your better off just setting up a LVL3 with your wrench right outside your spawn and redeploying it down the line when your other engineer gets his dispenser up. I’m sure someone much better at the class will find some great uses for it, but for me it just doesn’t cut the cake, and it especially doesn’t cut the Heavy

And last, but certainly not least, we have “Frontier Justice“, a shotgun replacement that puts fear into the hearts of men. This shotgun has a 50% smaller magazine than the standard shotgun your Engineer starts out with, and it doesn’t get any random crits. However, it does get “Revenge Crits”. What this means is for every kill your sentry racks up, upon that sentries destruction you get two crits, and you get one crit for every kill assist! When your sentry gets destroyed (either by some bastard ubered heavy or a well timed self-destruct, your Engineer receives bonus crits as well. This thing is scary. If you see an engineer running at you covered in lightning… get away fast.

So if your looking for something to do other than continue running heroics for gear thats just going to be replaced, or just need a break from raiding in general, I highly recommend blowing the dust off your steam account and coming to join me for some gold old fashioned TF2 Fun. You can find me on steam inside TF2 (usually playing CTF_2FORT) as Oprah Winfrey. If you ever login to a game and see a big spray of Oprah giving you a thumbs up, feel free to give me some love in chat. I’d love to get a group of people together and actually run some strats, so if any of your moggers out there play shoot me an email over to Jason@MOGS.com and we will see if we can throw a friendly little team together

GTFO – WoW Addon Author Interview

GTFO is a very simple mod that does one primary thing and does it perfectly, alert you when it’s time to GET THE **** OUT of the fire or damaging AOE during a Raid or Dungeon Encounter in World of Warcraft. While it may be one of the most basic principles of End-Game raiding, Fire (and AOE in general) is still the main cause of Orc and Human orphans everywhere. Zensunim, a Feral Druid from Malygos, stepped up to the plate and provided half-afk raiders everywhere the perfect tool for notifying them of imminent failure.

What attracted you to WoW in the first place? What other MMO’s have you played?

I was watching a friend play on his computer and was extremely impressed by the overall design and polish of the game. I was also amazed by the fact that if you didn’t like the game’s UI, you could download an addon and completely change it to something else. I used to play Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online and when I first looked on the WoW forums, I remember thinking about how the issues people were griping about were so petty compared to the concerns other MMOs had.

• UO: Someone used a break-in exploit on my house and stole everything I ever owned and the GMs basically said “sucks to be you!”
• SWG: The server crashed and deleted millions of credits worth of the items I put into my store vendor and the GMs can’t or won’t fix it.
• WoW: Flight paths are too long and boring!

What class do you play and why?

My main character is a night elf feral druid with tanking and DPS specs and my primary alt is a blood elf disc priest, but I have played just about every race and class out there. The versatility and flexibility of the druid easily makes it my favorite character. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been able to “save the day” by switching into bear form and tanking in DPS gear after the real tank went down. I also enjoy tanking because it allows me to take charge of the situation, not to mention the instant queue times from the Random Dungeon finder!

What’s your primary/favorite pastime in WoW when you’re not coding? Raiding? PvP?

I used to do some PvP, but I’m big into raiding. Apart from being a lot of fun, it’s also a great way to test my mods. My guild (Dilution of Malygos server) is working on regular 25-man Lich King, but the Low Attendance debuff has been kicking our asses for a while now.

What led you to write GTFO?

Back in BC, I was a fire tank for the Illidan fight. In phase 2, I was having difficulty judging when I was taking damage from the fire on the floor (Blaze) because the fire animation was much larger than the actual damage zone. To help me out, I programmed a mod with an audible alert to let me know when I was taking Blaze damage. This allowed me to optimize my kiting path on that fight.

Our guild recruited some new members and one of our new healers was having serious difficulty staying out of the AOE during the Illidari Council fight. I realized I could use my Blaze alert mod to warn about other stuff. I recoded the mod, sent it to the healer, and it worked! She stopped dying in that fight.

Did you have any prior scripting or programing experience or did you just dive into it? What resources did you find to be the biggest help in developing your first World of Warcraft Addon?

Apart from being a programmer professionally, I had developed a few other WoW mods prior to GTFO, but most were never released. SmartError is the only other mod I wrote that’s available publicly. That mod allows me to switch off the character error speech (which bugs the hell out of me) and replace it with more of my custom beeps and boops, along with audible events for other annoying but easily missed error messages/events like “that object is busy.”

I built an automated raid healing program I designed for two-boxing in 40-man raids. You spam one button continuously and the priest character would triage hurt players in range based on overall health, the rate they’re losing health, the type of character they are, and how much I liked them (jackasses had lower priority for heals), do a bunch of calculations, and then cast the appropriate heal, stop casting if another person healed the target, dispel debuffs, manage mana, etc. Eventually, I was coming close to building a hive-mind: multiple healers linked together as one massive healing machine, but Blizzard nerfed what add-ons could do with the 2.0 patch so I abandoned the project. It was fun while it lasted.

When it comes to developing mods, the API reference lists at wowwiki.com are very helpful, but the best resource I found was just from looking at other people’s mods and taking them apart and seeing how they did things. The Official WoW Add-ons forum can be a great place to find help, but it’s hit-and-miss depending on who’s browsing the forums that day.

By now, or at least sometime in the near future, your mod will be recommended by most guilds next to Omen or Deadly Boss Mods. Do you see yourself continuing to play and update GTFO through Cataclysm? Or would you allow the project to be passed on should your interests take you in other directions?

I’m constantly making updates and look forward to updating it in Cataclysm (or before that if I can score a beta invite). One of my plans is to start going through some of the old dungeons and start adding alerts for them, along with a level cap for some alerts (standing in a level 20 mob’s Flamestrike is dangerous at level 15, but completely ignorable at level 80).

If I were to quit the game, I would want someone to pick up the project and continue with it. It’s pretty easy to maintain as it’s just identifying and classifying new alerts for various spell IDs.

You have been keeping a very active presence on your curse.com page for the Addon and it’s allowed both you and your users to get a lot of feedback. Do you feel their comments have influenced the direction you are starting to take as far as implementing a wider ranger of alerts and tank friendly options?

The biggest request I get is to have some visual indicator built in because several people play the game without sound. A little known fact is that GTFO is actually integrated in the latest version of Power Auras Classic today, but it requires some set up and it doesn’t distinguish between the three types of GTFO alerts. I’m putting together a manual on how to set it up.

Unfortunately, the way it’s set up in Power Auras, tank-friendly alerts will break how Power Auras displays alerts, so I’ve been holding off on releasing that. I wrote a patch for Power Auras for improved GTFO support and I’ve been trying to get a hold of the latest Power Auras author to get it added to the official release, but I think he disappeared a couple months ago.

Comments and feedback help a lot! I usually have to do all the testing myself and make guesses based on spell data I find from online fight logs and data mining sites for fights I haven’t had a chance to do (like Heroic ICC).

Thanks for taking the time to answer a few of our questions Zen, is there you have anything else you want to say or any tips you can give any potential modders and addon authors out there?

Put comments in your code! Not only does it help others understand your code, it helps YOU understand your own code when you have to go back and update something you haven’t touched in months. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go follow my own advice.

- Zensunim of Malygos

Visit curse.com and download GTFO now.

Video Gamers Can Save The World

Video game designer Jane McGonigal saw that gamers in real life when approached with a situation we may become anxious and feel overwhelmed, but in game we can stand up to anything., whether it is you vs an entire army of undead or, traveling through space to stop an evil empire. Because of this she researched on how that can be applied to real world situations. I highly recommend that you watch this 20 minute video. Here’s a brief synopsis on her findings.

Currently gamers play approx 3 billion hours a week playing online games. According to her research, we need to increase this to 21 billion hours a week. This is because in video games the best is brought out in us. In an online video game, you are more apt to help others at a given situation, to come together to stop a cause, and to problem solve than in a real life group situation. If you add up all of the time that everyone has logged onto in World of Warcraft, it would span approx 5.93 million years. That’s an unfathomable amount of time. With all of this time passed, it can only be comparable to the time of evolution itself. With that, all the time that we have put into the game is evolving us as a generation of humans.

It is said that if you spend 10,000 hours in something before the age of 21, you will become a virtuoso at it. There is also 10,080 hours from 5th grade – highschool graduation. So while students are going through school, there is also a parallel form of education that the children are learning. To put it in scale of the information, currently Wikipedia is the largest gathering of online information. The second largest is the World of Warcraft Wikipedia with over 50,000 entries. That is more than any other wiki on any other topic in the world. Well with all of this knowledge and time spent in the game, what exactly are gamers good at? Well Jane narrowed it down to 4 areas; Urgent Optimism, Social Fabric, Blissful Productivity, and Epic Meaning. Gamers possess urgent optimism, which is the ability to act immediately in a stressful situation always believing for the best outcome. Gamers weave a tight-knit social fabric, it is found that after you play a game with someone you are more apt to be friends with them. Gamers posses blissful productivity, which is in a game context, they are always doing something, they are rarely sitting around in a game doing nothing. And they are out there for the epic meaning, the large scale of it all. With all of this Jane looked to apply this to real-world situations, by creating games that could be possible in a real life situation and see how gamers react; these range from living through an oil shortage to surviving for the last 23 days on the planet. Gamers have provided her and her team with constant feedback and showing that we could adapt and survive in those situations. She recommends that everyone begins to play more games so we can one day save the world. So sit back in your big comfy chair and get gaming, we have a planet to save.

-Jon
Mogs.com

Modern Warfare 2 Ridiculous Knife Kill

Hats off to this guy. I wonder if he’s considering joining the military.

-Christian

Starcraft II

Blizzard recently released another teaser for SC2, in the form of a new Zerg unit. The Brutalisk is one of many of the custom units that will be available for use in the single player campaign mode. As you can see in the picture, it towers over the Marines gathered below it, and seems to be on a much larger scale than any of the ground units we have seen thus far for SC2. SC2 Beta has been pushed back to 2010, so hopefully Blizzard is getting close to putting the final touches on a fully playable version of the game.

Jake

Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV is a new MMORPG that is in the works by Square Enix. It is slated for a worldwide release in 2010, in almost every language. Details are scarce at the moment, but they have been slowly pouring in as we grow closer to 2010. Square is hoping to redefine the MMO with Final Fantasy XIV, with its deep story being via in game cutscenes and through questing.

Firstly, the game is set to be in more of a futuristic world, in contrast to medieval setting of Final Fantasy XI. The job system of FFXI will be included once again, but it seems the emphasis behind character growth will focus on the weapons this time around. The weapons will have some kind of tie in with character progression, and will influence how you play the game and attack.

Interestingly, there will be no experience points or leveling system in this game. Square Enix wants the game to have a very organic feeling, where players have the freedom to quest and try new and different things at their own pace. Character growth should then be a natural progression of this exploration, rather than a grind.

The two newest classes that were released a few days ago are the Gladiator, and the Pugilist. The gladiator is a heavily-armored close range fighter, with their weapons including swords, shields, throwing knives, and even a blade encrusted shield that can be use offensively and defensively. On the other hand, the Pugilist is a lightly armored melee fighter that utilizes hand to hand attacks.

Final Fantasy enthusiasts will also be pleased to know that Square just announced a release date for Final Fantasy XIII. It will arrive for the Xbox360 and PS3 on March 9, 2010. So it looks like we can look forward to two new Final Fantasy games next year.

Jake

Atlantica Online

Atlantica Online is a free to play game that offers strategic turn based game control of several characters. If you are looking for a break from traditional MMO’s and just want to try something different, fun, and free, Atlantica Online is a pretty good choice. I was surprised at how smooth the play was and how fun it is to pick up new boxes and follow the quest line. What are these boxes? They are packages that contain items and goods. When you open them it is somewhat like a lottery or slot machine, items spin around and you win something. There are tons of rare and unique items that pop up.

Characters are pretty cool, a selection of mercenaries are available for you to grow your army. All those little items popping out of the boxes give you opportunity to gear up all the characters that follow your main toon through the game. I can’t say I’ll invest a great deal of time in the game, but for something different now and then it’s better than most of the free to play games sweeping the industry.

Dan@mogs.com

Battle.net Authenticator on Your iPhone!

Want to be the coolest person at your next WoW party? Then check out the free Battle.net authenticator application for the iPhone and iPod touch. Ditch that pesky keychain authenticator and go high tech with Blizzard’s newest security innovation**. The Battle.net authenticator application for the iPhone/iPod touch goes everywhere you go and doesn’t get misplaced or left at home like the keychain version. You might not need your keys, but you will always have your iPhone with you, right?

World of Warcraft security? There’s an app for that!

**Be sure to read the notes in the application description for a trouble free installation.

SteelSeries Releases AION Limited Edition Zboard

Following their line of WoW-themed gaming gear SteelSeries is releasing an AION-themed Zboard. It’s available now for pre-order ($19.99) It’s pretty…

-Christian