In the news today
Well, there were just so many articles that I though I had to make a whole new blog post around it.
Firstly, the one I emailed to Waynne and Alex since it meshed so nicely with a discussion we were having at roleplaying last night about region-encoded DVDs. PS2 Mod Chips Legal In Australia.
Then, in some viral news, First PSP Trojan Reported, and the coverage of it on 1up.
An erotic MMO targetting female players? You better believe it.
And finally, a streaming audio (sadly) commentary on the recent viral outbreak in WoW. Nothing amazing or new, but a pretty interesting listen anyway. It buffered every minute or so on my work ADSL connection, so not really something for dialup users.
Also, I've just spoken to a boyfriend of a KoL friend who plays WoW (Sixminutes on Elune), and was around for the plague. It went down like this:
In Zul'Gruub there is a mob called Hakkar who casts a debuff called Corrupted Blood, which deals ~200-300 damage every 2 seconds for 3-6 seconds. It is transmissible to nearby allies, but only when you lose the buff. So, either die or time runs out. It was never meant to leave the area, but Blizzard missed some method of leaving, presumably the hearthstone (which lets you teleport back to your home town once every hour). Once in town, it can spread to NPCs, but when the NPCs aren't involved in combat, they regenerate faster than Corrupted Blood deals damage. So, if there are NPCs withing infection range of each other, Corrupted Blood will hang around forever. Any hapless n00b who happens to be within infection range when it times out on the NPCs will be infected, probably die, and then hand the debuff back to the NPC. For safe keeping. Other tricks for transporting the disease (rather than just sentry-warding it) involving two players bouncing it between each other while riding around, or a single player with a hardcore pet, and bouncing it back and forth between them. Apparently staying alive is far from trivial, but also far from impossible for higher levels. This dude I was speaking to has approximately 3000 HP at 60th level. Two of those running around can grief a lot of n00bs.
Well, hope that was enlightening ^_^ It certainly was for me.
Firstly, the one I emailed to Waynne and Alex since it meshed so nicely with a discussion we were having at roleplaying last night about region-encoded DVDs. PS2 Mod Chips Legal In Australia.
Then, in some viral news, First PSP Trojan Reported, and the coverage of it on 1up.
An erotic MMO targetting female players? You better believe it.
And finally, a streaming audio (sadly) commentary on the recent viral outbreak in WoW. Nothing amazing or new, but a pretty interesting listen anyway. It buffered every minute or so on my work ADSL connection, so not really something for dialup users.
Also, I've just spoken to a boyfriend of a KoL friend who plays WoW (Sixminutes on Elune), and was around for the plague. It went down like this:
In Zul'Gruub there is a mob called Hakkar who casts a debuff called Corrupted Blood, which deals ~200-300 damage every 2 seconds for 3-6 seconds. It is transmissible to nearby allies, but only when you lose the buff. So, either die or time runs out. It was never meant to leave the area, but Blizzard missed some method of leaving, presumably the hearthstone (which lets you teleport back to your home town once every hour). Once in town, it can spread to NPCs, but when the NPCs aren't involved in combat, they regenerate faster than Corrupted Blood deals damage. So, if there are NPCs withing infection range of each other, Corrupted Blood will hang around forever. Any hapless n00b who happens to be within infection range when it times out on the NPCs will be infected, probably die, and then hand the debuff back to the NPC. For safe keeping. Other tricks for transporting the disease (rather than just sentry-warding it) involving two players bouncing it between each other while riding around, or a single player with a hardcore pet, and bouncing it back and forth between them. Apparently staying alive is far from trivial, but also far from impossible for higher levels. This dude I was speaking to has approximately 3000 HP at 60th level. Two of those running around can grief a lot of n00bs.
Well, hope that was enlightening ^_^ It certainly was for me.
posted by Synkronos at 3:20 pm
2 Comments:
The disease is nasty. Anyone who can't self heal, is really advised to steer clear of it. Some other notes of interest:
1. If you die due to the disease, it is considered a non PvP death, so you take a 10% durability loss. Basically costing you gold and annoying you.
2. Priests and what not can not get this off you fast enough to make any difference due to the extremely short duration. By the time a priest finds you. You're either dead, have infected him, or can handle it just fine.
3. Healing people who get it and aren't around other people can save them, if you stay back. I ended up saving a few people that way. They were very thankful. {The disease has a range of about 10yds, healers can heal at 40yds.)
4. This disease came from the end boss of a fairly hard instance(dungeon) the people who brought it back knew full well what they were doing. On my server they would run through groups as fast as they could with the disease spreading it around to grief lower level players, because while 300 damage is a scratch to someone who has 3000-7000hp.. It's not to someone with 100 :(.
They even respawned the disease several times just to be jerks.
5. An interesting thing nobody covered. The disease made a splotching noise when it transmitted and briefly surrounded you with red blood. Rather annoying. It sounded sorta like trouncing through mud. *SPLOTCH!*
6. Elune is a PvE server. Things like this don't spread from PvP flagged players (people who will allow the opposing faction to attack them) to non-PvP flagged players. And vice-versa.
Most of the populace is non-flagged, so flagging yourself was seen as a vaccine of sorts. You were asked to only flag once you were clean.
So few people flagged that it was working well for those who did. I suspect that if the flagged people reached a critical mass, they would have gotten someone to give them the disease for "fun."
----
As for Sixminutes, as a 60th level (that's the level cap) priest, was not in real danger from the disease unless I was stupid, because I could heal myself. But I saw many high level characters who could not heal themselves die. Or did not realize how bad the situation was.
This disease turned the most busy part of the main alliance capitol (Ironforge) into a ghost town.
Personally, I saw the people who brought it back and kept it spreading as jerks of the highest order. It's cute if it was an accident. To keep it going is worthy of being known as jerks. Which the guild involved is well known for being.
-Sixminutes - 60 Dwarf Priest - Elune Server
Can we get the name of the Guild involved? ya know, just for interest...
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