Hi Everyone.

Unfortunately, due to the database hardware issues we have been seeing today, it has become necessary to keep the LOTRO service offline until sometime tomorrow. Our NetOps team are working closely with our hardware engineers to resolve the problems efficiently. However, given the current circumstances a resolution will not be obtained until tomorrow.

Whilst we would like to provide an accurate timescale, in this instance, it is very difficult to estimate. However, we are aiming to have the service back up and running at around midday (BST) on 18/04/07.

We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this has caused and will of course keep you updated with any further details as they occur.

http://community.codemasters.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2439713&postcount=767

I would like to apply for a position on the blizzard dev team. i realize that the black temple is already in development, so i'm going to design a brand new raid instance named the "Not as Black as the Black Temple".



Attunement:

Single quest similar to the naxx attunement. to receive the quest you must be exalted with the following:
cenarion expedition
thrallmar/honor hold
lower city
the violet eye
shattar
booty bay
bloodsail bucaneers
and some new factions that arent in the game yet

quest received from adal

bring adal the following:

-20 heads of nightbane (doesnt have to be nightbane, could be anything that's on a 1 week timer, such as magmadar's left paw)

-350 heroic badges (again, the timer is the key part)

-10 of each flask available in the game (this is obviously to prove that by this time all flasks have been discovered on your server, because all encounters will be balanced around them)

-50 of each potion/elixir (same reason as above)

-5 stacks of certain food (this part is class specific, for example if youre a healer you have to bring Golden Fish Sticks. this shows that you can either fish and cook them yourself, or have someone else who can do it for you. again, these will be required in every encounter, including trash packs)

-All the collective gold on your account, as well as any you recieve in the following three months. (this is to ensure you do not cheat by buying any reagent used by any of the craftables and actually farm everything yourself. it will require you to level multiple characters to 70 in order to farm everything. there will be a new repair bot as part of the promised engineering rework that will require 36 of each primal - including nether - and it will repair your items for free. obviously your entire guild will have to farm these so you can repair between attempts)




The instance:
upon entering the "Not as Black as the Black Temple", your entire raid will be crushed causing all items on everyone to break. this is to check to see if you have an egineer who has learned the new repair bot recipe since it is crucial to the instance. all gear in your bags and bank will also be broken to not allow any gear swapping.
the dungeon itself will be designed as an original maze with keys that open gates leading to further parts of the dungeon. there are multiple paths to follow, all unique and never before seen in any other dungeon crawler game. totally unlike anything that you might have experienced in any other game. (note: "any other game" does not include games in the zelda series, or games that use dungeons with keys.)
the overall instance progression will be as follows: first three bosses > the gauntlet > the tedious maze > raid check > hall of endless trash > 3 more bosses.
so lets start,

Soontobetuned Cockblock Lord
10,000,000 HP
8 minute enrage
immune to taunt

abilities:
lolcrush: passive - allows Cockblock Lord to crush your tank ignoring all types of mitigation. cannot be dodged or parried.
roflaoe: 30s cooldown - will create a double barrier around a random player. anyone inside or outside both barriers will recieve 10000 damage after 2 seconds. players within the two barriers will recieve 5000 damage. inner barrier is at 40 yards from the targetted person, and outer barrier at 41 yards.
pwnageswing: 10s cooldown - Cockblock Lord will enchant his melee attacks with a random element and begin attacking with elemental damage instead of physical.
hardon: at 40% Cockblock Lord will begin to fight with his Cock, allowing him to hit additional people in melee range, or squirting on any ranged caster.

after clearning Soontobetuned, you can loot a dungeon key from him and proceed to either Dice Roller the Blind, or Farmalot the Resist Checker.

Dice Roller the Blind
5,000,000 HP
no enrage timer
tauntable

abilities:
Blind Throw: 5s - Dice Roller will blindly throw his two glaives in two random directions. anyone hit by either of the glaives will die. this also resets his agro.
The Salad: 5s - players will randomly receive a buff called "Tossed" that will allow them to attack/cast 50% faster. has a high chance of targetting Dice Roller himself.
Soul Gaze: 30s - Dice Roller will revert your attack type, all damaging skills will heal him, and all healing abilities will damage allies. the tooltip for this ability is hidden.
Petrifying Vision: 1m - Dice Roller will turn a raid member into stone for the rest of the fight.
Luck of the Draw: used at 20% - has a chance to wipe the entire raid.

Dice Roller may or may not drop a dungeon key.

Farmalot the Resist Checker
Farmalot has five forms corresponding to the five schools of magic: fire, frost, arcane, shadow, nature
7,500,000 HP
15 minute enrage
non tauntable

abilities:
Chromatic Blast: 2m - Farmalot will emit five waves of elemental magic. Each pulse will be a different school of magic and the damage dealt equal to 20% of the player's health. No resists in at least one school will result in death.
Pulsing Essence: aura, 50 yard radius - Farmalot will emit an aura dealing 2000 damage every 2 seconds of whichever form he is in.
Chromatic Shift: 2m - Farmalot will change forms resetting all agro and picking a new elemental form.
The Great Sink: 1m - 20 beneficial buffs will be removed from players, players with under 20 buffs will die.

Resist Checker will drop another dungeon key. it can be used to either open Dice Roller's gate, or proceed further into the dungeon. the next step: The Gauntlet.

The Gauntlet
The Gauntlet is a fast paced tunnel packed with action. For every mob killed, two mobs will spawn, causing it to become more and more difficult. At the end of the Gauntlet is the next gate, leading into the Maze.

The Tedious Maze
In order to revisit old encounters, The Maze will consist of nine randomly chosen bosses from old dungeons. They will all have slightly different names, although still recognizable. They will also be uniquely redesigned so that they look a slightly bluer shade of what people have been used to. These nine random bosses will drop a fragment of the next dungeon key, in addition to new loot. the new loot will be amazingly new and never before seen, it will resemble the tier 3 set from naxxramas, except it will be blue, and in some rare exciting cases green. Once all 9 fragments have been combined to form the next key, player can proceed to the next part.

Raid Check
This is a unique event similar to the Karazhan Chess and Opera events. Upon activating the Raid Check, 25 NPCs of random classes will spawn (odds are very low, but it is possible for all of them to end up as one class). Each NPC must be matched by a player in your raid in full tier 6 gear. If the matchup does not occur, you cannot proceed deeper into the dungeon. This event completely removes the chance of having stacked raids and gearing out certain people, such as tanks for the four horsemen and magtheridon. Now your raid has to be stacked by every class in every possible way, no more discrimination. It is recommended that you do not attempt this event unless you have at least 10 people of each class in full tier 6 who are able to log in and out based on the NPC respawn of the week.
After matching the NPCs a chest will spawn containing the next dungeon key.

Hall of Endless Trash
Many people disagree, but a good long session of trash killing is the cornerstone of any raid. That's why the Hall of Endless Trash will be enjoyed by most. And for the people who do not believe in trash being exciting, there is now a new twist. the 20 trash pulls in the Hall of Endless Trash will have a certain kill order. If killed in the wrong order, the Hall will reset and all mobs will respawn. For example if pack x is cleared and then pack y is cleared, pack x will respawn if pack y was not to follow x. So the best way to proceed is to kill different combination of packs until you find one that does not cause a respawn, and then work from there. This will result in an exciting and dynamic possiblity of 20! trash pulls, or roughly 2.4x10^18.
After clearing the Hall, you can proceed to the last few bosses of the instance.

Pushover Bore the Lootbag
20,000,000 HP
no enrage

abilities:
Hybernate: 10m cooldown - Pushover will enter a hybernation stage, reducing all damage caused to it by 75% and regenerating 1% of its life per second. Lasts 20 seconds.
Yawn: 1m - Pushover will yawn. Yawning has no effect at all on anything.
Unmotivated Blow: 10s - Pushover will swing at your tank in a very unmotivated fashion. Causes half damage.

after defeating Lootbag you will have access to the last two bosses of the dungeon: Glitchmaster and Crashmaster.

Crashmaster, Lord of Rolling Server Upgrades
This fight is so amazingly awesome and fast paced that the current servers cannot handle the load. In order to avoid spoilers, the abilities will not be listed. To give a brief preview, the fight will be a mixture of Simon Says, sports trivia, Counterstrike, Whac-A-Mole, a blender, Hungry Hungry Hippos, an appearance by Eric Idle, Dance Dance Revolution, the Break system from Final Fantay VII, Need for Speed, River Raid, the original Batman movie, a scripted surprise ending by Stanley Kubrick, and much much more.

Glitchmaster the Impossible
Glitchmaster is a 3 phase fight. Phase 2 occurs at 50% life, and phase 3 at 20%.
10,000,000 HP
no enrage
untauntable

Phase 1:
Bugout: with every swing Glitchmaster has the ability to bug out and spawn a fresh copy of himself, restarting the fight.
Bugin: with every swing Glitchmaster has the ability to despawn himself.
Glitchstrike: 10s cooldown - Glitchmaster will strike a player and enraging them, causing them to deal extra damage. However the strike will glitch and nothing will happen.
at 50% Glitchmaster will teleport and get stuck between two walls, and then summon an army.


Phase 2:
Glitch Swarm: An army will be summoned proving much more difficult than the boss himself. Wiping to the adds during this phase will permanently glitch the fight for the rest of the raid week.
Howl: 5s cooldown - Glitchmaster will fear a target causing them to run under the world, through walls, or disconnect from the server.
Evade: Having teleported between walls, Glitchmaster will become permanently evaded for the rest of the fight.

Phase 3:
Upon clearing the adds Glitchmaster will remain Evade bugged and will eventually despawn.
After the despawn a soft instance reset is needed to attempt the fight again.
See phase 1 for starting over.


That is the end. Each attempt will attune one person in your raid for Warhammer Online.


http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=86718409&sid=1

und ich weiß noch wie tseric sich mal im forum ausgekotzt hat nicht jeder ist ein developer und gerade die blizzjungs sind so pro dass es ein normaler mensch niemals schafft developer zu werden (tigole.. yeah, right). tseric ist so ein stammler...

Sigil’s Brad McQuaid talks about the state of Vanguard, as the game enters the third beta phase
By Michael Lafferty

“I think that is one of our strengths is to say this is not just a game, this is a home.”

It’s been six or so months since Sigil Games hosted a media event that allowed video-game journalists the opportunity to get a glimpse of its pending massively multiplayer game, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.

The cliché would be “oh, what a difference six months makes,” but that is only half true. Vanguard was already shaping up to be a triple-A title. What Sigil, and Sony Online Entertainment showed off during the recent San Diego event only confirms that. Ok, at this juncture we can’t go into details about that game – that is still under embargo – but the game is still expanding and in the third beta phase. There will be two more beta phases prior to the game’s tentative release date in the first quarter of 2007.

GameZone was also able to sit down with Sigil’s Brad McQuaid, chairman, CEO and executive producer of the title for a chat about the game.


Question: It’s been six months since we last saw the game. What significant changes, generally speaking, have gone into the development of the game between then and now?

Brad: We’re totally 100% in the production mode; we are just cranking out content, the art team is much, much faster so we are producing more fantasy, more fantastic, more interesting new areas, and making them more quickly. The design team has gotten their tools down and are really getting a lot of new content into the game. The switch from beta two to three was huge – we’ve let a lot more people into the beta and we’ve learned a lot, so much from beta one to two and reacted to it and saw a retention, people being happy and enjoying beta three.
 

Q: Earlier today you spoke about EverQuest. Vanguard is a huge leap forward from EQ Live (which Brad also was part of), not only in technological terms but in terms of expectations. People are a little more savvy, and more knowledgeable about MMOs in general. How are you position Vanguard to meet the expectations of both the high-end or hardcore gamer as well as the more casual gamer?

Brad: Well, that’s our biggest challenge. People naturally assume the extremes – you are either a casual gamer or a hardcore gamer. In my opinion most people are in the middle, the core gamer. So we are really focusing on the message that our game is not a hardcore game. It has hardcore content, it has casual content but the majority of the content is core content where you can log on for an hour and have a good time. You can work eight hours on some rare item, but you can do it in two- or three-hour chunks. We realize that people who played EQ have grown up; we realize we want to attract a lot of people who play WoW (World of Warcraft) who have different expectations, different experiences. One of the benefits of being Sigil and having our background in EverQuest is the recognition, but it is a lot of the challenges that a lot of people assume that this game will be a lot of camping and hardcore. So that is one of our big efforts right now in messaging, marketing and PR is that, yes, we are more challenging and deeper and are about longevity. We hope that people, World of Warcraft players that have three of four characters at max level, and are looking for something more, we want to let them know about Vanguard. So one challenge is even letting them know, because maybe they are new players and weren’t around in the EQ days, or maybe they were around and they only heard ‘oh, it is a hardcore game.’ So we want to get the message out right.


Q: You are giving players a well-rounded playing experience. When someone logs in, there are four things they can do – adventuring, harvesting, crafting or diplomacy…

Brad: Yes, and those things take different amounts of time, too. One example I use is you are mostly into adventuring but you still enjoy harvesting and diplomacy and you log in one day and your buddies are not on. Normally you might log off, but with Vanguard, you might spend an hour harvesting. There are all sorts of things in there for core gamers, for people with different amounts of contiguous amounts of time they can commit to playing in a given session. That’s our biggest challenge.

With the switch from Microsoft to Sony (as publisher) we’ve lost several months of marketing. So we are playing a little catch up. It’s not the end of the world, we can it and we’re really focusing hard on getting the message out.


Q: Right now the MMO market is somewhat stagnant. There are no triple-A titles releasing in the very near future, and one gets a sense that MMOers are waiting for the next big thing …

Brad: They really are. And to my knowledge, other than maybe Lord of the Rings Online and other than World of Warcraft’s expansion, I don’t think there are any other triple-A titles for 2007 …

Well, there is Conan …

Brad: I don’t think it is going to be ’07 and if it is, it will be late ’07.

And you also have Gods and Heroes …

Brad: They are both very different kinds of experiences. I’m talking a WoW kind of MMO. The definition of an MMO is kind of blurred. For example, is D&D Online an MMO. I would say no; some people would say yes. But for that virtual world, exploration, immersion, your WoW/EQ/Vanguard-type game, we’re pretty much it for ’07 and that’s a tremendous opportunity for us. We really excited about it.


Q: Are you afraid that when you tell people that ‘our game, when you buy it, is 25 gigs of hard-drive space,’ are you afraid that will be a little daunting to some?

Brad: I don’t think the hard-drive requirements are going to be a problem. Nothing has gotten cheaper than hard drives, you can get a hard-drive for nothing. I am concerned about the perception that you will need a very expensive PC, in terms of graphics cards and CPU to run the game, and the game does take advantage of Shader 2 technology, and it’s meant for longevity, it’s meant to look good years and years from now, but we are spending a lot of time optimizing and getting it to run on lower-end machines. It will never run as well as like WoW but WoW is also going to have a problem in four years still looking good.

My two biggest concerns is that people think the game is hardcore and they think they will need some $3,000 machine to run it. That’s not going to be the case. It’s a core-gamer game, it’s challenging but not tedious, and an average gamer’s machine should be able to run it.

We want to reward the guy with the uber machine (with enhanced graphics) but we don’t want to say you can’t play it if you don’t have that type of machine. The thing is you can grow into it. If you can upgrade your machine in six months, you will be rewarded for it in game.


Q: Your world is huge, but you’ve left a lot of space for expansions. Earlier today you talked about how you have left yourself space for expansions …

Brad: Years of expansions …

With all that in mind, what do you do to draw the line for the release, for the expansion …

Brad: I think as long as you have enough content, and functionality at release, to keep the average gamer happy, until you launch your first expansion, and you have a decent live team, you are ready to launch. To me, launching an MMO , is an arbitrary date – when we start charging for it, because an MMO is never done, that’s the beauty of it. But it’s not right to charge for it until you can entertain the average guy, and if you are going to launch an expansion every nine months, you had better have enough content for the average guy to last nine months. And you should have a live team, too, that keeps it tuned and tweaked and adding some new content. And that’s our commitment, and that’s what we are going to do. We are also hinting and talking about the Vanguard of 2008 is going to be so much more than the Vanguard of 2007 because longevity is what Vanguard is all about. I want this game going for years.

And with all due respect to World of Warcraft, that doesn’t seem to be their focus. I think that is one of our strengths is to say this is not just a game, this is a home. Come home and play this game and it will look good and play well, and entertain you and give you new challenges and new features for the next five or 10 years.

http://pc.gamezone.com/news/10_12_06_01_03PM.htm

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der gute alte brad. will einen besseren wow clone baun, spricht davon das DDO kein mmo ist wegen der instanzen (obwohl sich in wow auf 60 auch nur alles in instanzen abspielt, sollte man wissen wenn man nen klon baut), und dass vanguard in 10 jahren noch so gut aussehen soll wie jetzt - wo man darüber streiten kann ob es überhaupt "gut" aussieht.

lassen wir uns einfach mal überraschen

http://entertainment.upperdeck.com/wow/en/news/article.aspx?aid=1243

gott, wie ich hoffe sie fallen damit auf die nase..

http://www.shacknews.com/extras/2006/092106_eveonline_1.x

nichts neues, aber man erfährt einiges über die art und weise wie CPP die spieler sieht. selbst wenn das nur marketing-blabla ist macht er es vorbildlich

als jemand der langeweile hat (hab ja keinen bf 2142 key bekommen ) hab ich mir die zeit vertrieben mich über qw zu informieren. dabei bin ich über folgendes video gestolpert:

http://planetquake4.net/download.php?op=fileid&lid=2333

ein paar kennen es sicher schon, wer nicht bekommt damit einen guten einblick - und man ist die zeit gut unterhalten

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=13622477&pageNo=1

It was mentioned in a previous post that the 1.12 honor system would be more forgiving. In fact, it is just the opposite. It is now just as bad if not worse. I was about 30% of the way through Rank 7 and on my way to Rank 8. However, this week I got over 150,000 honor and I am only about 65% of the way through Rank 7. Your honor system has not improved at all, Blizzard. All you managed to do was reduce queue times.

More than likely the PvP changes have encouraged more players to participate in PvP, either through the battlegrounds or the outdoor PvP objectives. Compound that by the ability in the cross realm battlegrounds to fight a larger possible number of honor giving targets, and it's entirely likely that the amount of people participating in PvP and the amount of honor being gained has increased substantially making your rank achievement a bit tougher for now. It may just take a bit for everything to settle down as the PvP features move out of their 'cool new feature' phase, and everyone either calms down a bit or goes back to what they would normally be doing.

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http://www.joinfear.com/

der multiplayer-part von fear kann jetzt frei gezockt werden. registrieren, key holen, client saugen (der fast 2 gig groß ist ), zocken.