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		12 things you might not know about World of Warcraft, including a bonus Drew mention ( mentalfloss.com)		53
		More: Interesting, World of Warcraft, Twisting Nether, Azeroth, Blizzard Entertainment, Aubrey Plaza, Internet Movie Database, chicken fingers, Yao Ming

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6358 clicks; posted to Geek » on 12 Dec 2012 at 11:42 AM (5 years ago) | Favorite | share:

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Makh

2012-12-12 10:08:59 AM

I stopped playing. But what server, Drew? Please tell me you aren't Alliance.

Dead for Tax Reasons

2012-12-12 10:19:58 AM

1. Anything

TXEric

2012-12-12 11:48:26 AM

So, I guess this is still a thing, then.
Hmm.

PsyLord

2012-12-12 11:48:53 AM

FTA: 10. The day the plague wiped out Ironforge.

Apparently, people in Azeroth behave a lot like they behave in the real world. That's why the "Corrupted Blood" outbreak in World of Warcraft is so interesting to researchers. In 2005, a monster named Hakkar the Soulflayer, Blood God of the Gurubashi Trolls (what was his mother thinking?) infected a player with a spell called Corrupted Blood, which both drains characters of life, and is highly contagious. The idea was to weaken and ultimately kill everyone fighting in the dungeon. After someone was infected and teleported to the populous over-world, however, the disease went nova and a pandemic ensued. Try as they might, Blizzard couldn't quite stop the plague, and characters were wiped out on a massive scale. Players went into a strange and interesting survivalist mode.

lol.

Chunks McGunks

2012-12-12 11:50:41 AM

Stop being pussies. Get an EVE account so I can blow you up.

child_god

2012-12-12 11:52:06 AM

PsyLord: FTA: 10. The day the plague wiped out Ironforge.

Apparently, people in Azeroth behave a lot like they behave in the real world. That's why the "Corrupted Blood" outbreak in World of Warcraft is so interesting to researchers. In 2005, a monster named Hakkar the Soulflayer, Blood God of the Gurubashi Trolls (what was his mother thinking?) infected a player with a spell called Corrupted Blood, which both drains characters of life, and is highly contagious. The idea was to weaken and ultimately kill everyone fighting in the dungeon. After someone was infected and teleported to the populous over-world, however, the disease went nova and a pandemic ensued. Try as they might, Blizzard couldn't quite stop the plague, and characters were wiped out on a massive scale. Players went into a strange and interesting survivalist mode.

lol.

The best part was when it was intentionally spread.

Clash City Farker

2012-12-12 11:52:23 AM

This is The Clam Master. A clear reference to Howie Carr and his love of fried clams.

grinding_journalist

2012-12-12 11:54:24 AM

12 things you might not know about World of Warcraft, including a bonus ~~Drew mention~~ Iron Chef reference.

FTFsubby.

/it's refreshing to read an article written by someone who actually played

sprawl15

2012-12-12 11:58:24 AM

Blizzard started handing out 10 days of free time (including pandaland) to tempt me to reactivate.

I spent the whole duration trolling random lowbie dungeons.

success

meat0918

2012-12-12 11:58:46 AM

child_god: PsyLord: FTA: 10. The day the plague wiped out Ironforge.

Apparently, people in Azeroth behave a lot like they behave in the real world. That's why the "Corrupted Blood" outbreak in World of Warcraft is so interesting to researchers. In 2005, a monster named Hakkar the Soulflayer, Blood God of the Gurubashi Trolls (what was his mother thinking?) infected a player with a spell called Corrupted Blood, which both drains characters of life, and is highly contagious. The idea was to weaken and ultimately kill everyone fighting in the dungeon. After someone was infected and teleported to the populous over-world, however, the disease went nova and a pandemic ensued. Try as they might, Blizzard couldn't quite stop the plague, and characters were wiped out on a massive scale. Players went into a strange and interesting survivalist mode.

lol.

The best part was when it was intentionally spread.

It was an interesting event, to say the least.

Survival meant staying away from Ironforge and any flight path, also logging off until Blizzard fixed it.

theurge14

2012-12-12 11:59:38 AM

3. "You tell Stockholm I'm coming, and the Twisting Nether's comin' with me!"
Following the release of its fourth expansion pack, World of Warcraft's subscriber base climbed over the 10 million mark. Earlier this year, the game "only" had 9.1 million subscribers. At its peak, it had 12 million paying customers, and today holds the Guinness World Record for most subscribers to a massively multiplayer online role playing game. Its present numbers place Azeroth's population on par with Sweden, so they had better watch themselves.

And probably at least 6 million of those are bots and Chinese gold farmers.

Raw_fishFood

2012-12-12 11:59:42 AM

Don't lose your virginity to a WoW slut.

Lesson learned.

theurge14

2012-12-12 12:05:23 PM

12. World of Warcraft by the numbers.
According to MMORPG Realm, it took 150 developers four years to write the game's 5.5 million lines of code; create its 30,000 items; design and build its 1400 locations; plan and implement its 7600 missions; and give life to 5300 non-player characters.

And it takes 2 Blizzard graphic designers about 15 minutes to create one crappy looking tier set and another 5 minutes to save a few different colored variations of the same set as blue gear drops for heroics.

/it's no secret that the best looking gear in the game STILL dates back to vanilla
//lich king had the worst looking gear, cata wasn't much better

Raw_fishFood

2012-12-12 12:11:40 PM

theurge14: And it takes 2 Blizzard graphic designers about 15 minutes to create one crappy looking tier set and another 5 minutes to save a few different colored variations of the same set as blue gear drops for heroics.

/it's no secret that the best looking gear in the game STILL dates back to vanilla
//lich king had the worst looking gear, cata wasn't much better

I don't know about Cataclysm since I stopped playing at the end of Wrath, but I personally thought Tier 10 was the best looking Tier. They really borked it with tier 9 though.

But from what I've seen of Cata and Mists both look pretty bland. Not like it matters though, since everybody just uses that armor thing to wear older tiers for male toons and slut wear for female toons.

Strategeryz0r

2012-12-12 12:12:35 PM

Raw_fishFood: slut wear for female toons.

You say this as if it's a bad thing...

js34603

2012-12-12 12:15:22 PM

sprawl15: Blizzard started handing out 10 days of free time (including pandaland) to tempt me to reactivate.

I spent the whole duration trolling random lowbie dungeons.

success

What a proud day this must be for you.

theurge14

2012-12-12 12:15:52 PM

Strategeryz0r: Raw_fishFood: slut wear for female toons.

You say this as if it's a bad thing...

Only because every slut wear toon (blood elf) is a dude.

quizzical

2012-12-12 12:17:04 PM

I played my 10 free days of Pandas and had a lot of fun. Still, I'm not ready to jump back into a subscription.

Strategeryz0r

2012-12-12 12:17:55 PM

theurge14: Strategeryz0r: Raw_fishFood: slut wear for female toons.

You say this as if it's a bad thing...

Only because every slut wear toon (blood elf) is a dude.

Meh. I'd rather look at an MMO full of dudes playing as skimpy girls, than these guys trying to recreate their real life self. Wouldn't you rather have a game full of scantily clad virtual-women than a game full of fat-pimple-y basement dwelling mommas boys(all wow players are this =P)?

Reverend Monkeypants

2012-12-12 12:18:04 PM

Yeeeeaaaahhhh my shaman holds the Hand of Ragnaros....

What an insane waste of time that was...

sprawl15

2012-12-12 12:18:20 PM

js34603: sprawl15: Blizzard started handing out 10 days of free time (including pandaland) to tempt me to reactivate.

I spent the whole duration trolling random lowbie dungeons.

success

What a proud day this must be for you.

no that was a few days ago please try to keep up

Raw_fishFood

2012-12-12 12:19:57 PM

theurge14: Strategeryz0r: Raw_fishFood: slut wear for female toons.

You say this as if it's a bad thing...

Only because every slut wear toon (blood elf) is a dude.

That, and frankly it's kinda boring looking at those low poly Vanilla models. You seen one chain mail bikini Night Elf you've seen them all.

Geotpf

2012-12-12 12:20:54 PM

Celebrities who have spent some time delivering Scalding Mornbrew to Durnan Furcutter in Anvilmar include: Aubrey Plaza; Vin Diesel; Aron Eisenberg (Nog from Deep Space Nine!); Yao Ming; Mila Kunis; Felicia Day; Curt Shilling; and Drew Curtis, who should consider throwing a link to this article.

I always wonder if anybody famous plays my favorite addiction (Team Fortress 2). Closest I know of is Notch (creator of Minecraft). The developers even gave him a one of a kind hat (even though he wouldn't put Minecraft on Steam).

theurge14

2012-12-12 12:21:41 PM

Strategeryz0r: theurge14: Strategeryz0r: Raw_fishFood: slut wear for female toons.

You say this as if it's a bad thing...

Only because every slut wear toon (blood elf) is a dude.

Meh. I'd rather look at an MMO full of dudes playing as skimpy girls, than these guys trying to recreate their real life self. Wouldn't you rather have a game full of scantily clad virtual-women than a game full of fat-pimple-y basement dwelling mommas boys(all wow players are this =P)?

I play horde so there's no recreating real life selves with orcs and trolls and...

Oh.

theurge14

2012-12-12 12:23:52 PM

Geotpf: Celebrities who have spent some time delivering Scalding Mornbrew to Durnan Furcutter in Anvilmar include: Aubrey Plaza; Vin Diesel; Aron Eisenberg (Nog from Deep Space Nine!); Yao Ming; Mila Kunis; Felicia Day; Curt Shilling; and Drew Curtis, who should consider throwing a link to this article.

I always wonder if anybody famous plays my favorite addiction (Team Fortress 2). Closest I know of is Notch (creator of Minecraft). The developers even gave him a one of a kind hat (even though he wouldn't put Minecraft on Steam).

So Yao Ming is having to resort to gold farming since the NBA money ran out. Ni hao, indeed.

Vlad_the_Inaner

2012-12-12 12:25:16 PM

Speak of "Well someone had to die" related to warcraft....

Oh hai guys, what's going on in this thread?

/not as big a celebrity (errrr infamy), as Drew?

divgradcurl

2012-12-12 12:37:12 PM

no offense, but that guy that died from only playing 23 hrs was weaksauce. there are all kinds of jobs/projects that can require 24 hrs of attention to something, so i don't feel bad that this guy couldn't hack playing a computer game. my guess is there were some kind of preexisting conditions to make this happen, and then somebody just blamed WoW because it was the easiest thing to do.

Treygreen13

2012-12-12 12:43:22 PM

Cool advertising piece! You might be able to convince some people this isn't another in your recent WoW sponsored campaign!

roc6783

2012-12-12 12:48:55 PM

Raw_fishFood: Don't lose your virginity to a WoW slut.

Lesson learned.

Go on...

kab

2012-12-12 12:50:20 PM

What kind of hardware are we talking about? It's always changing, obviously, but Data Center Knowledge, a trade journal that covers such things, reported that as of 2009, World of Warcraft required 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cores, 112.5 terabytes of memory, and 1.2 petabytes of storage.

Interesting. From a geek standpoint, I'd be curious as to why they still have the need to do weekly maintenance, or at least not have some sort of a/b setup.

Mouthoy

2012-12-12 12:55:25 PM

Ah, the good old days of WoW, when you could kite world bosses to major cities...

Link

Or blow up the AH in Ironforge...

Link

Or armorless rogues beating fully armored players:

Link

Old WoW was so much fun...

Evil Mackerel

2012-12-12 12:57:30 PM

Or care about subby, WoW sucks.

worlddan

2012-12-12 01:03:10 PM

so much stupid fail in that article.

(1) The majority of players in the game are females 25-45. Blizzard has talked about that in the past and outside research has confirmed it.
(2) Yeah, he's an old guy but arguably the most famous person to play WoW is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Walken

he plays a Moonkin in PvP no less.

So can we get beyond this wow=teenage makes BS. I know it sells page views but it's flat out wrong.

Vegan Meat Popsicle

2012-12-12 01:04:55 PM

I knew all those things.

Nice way to slip in a crappy under-the-radar advert after getting bawled out the last time you pimped your site for this stupid game, though, Drew.

I'm not buying the expansion and I'm not resubbing because the game sucks donkey balls and has since, at bare minimum, patch 4.0

worlddan

2012-12-12 01:05:01 PM

errr....teenage males....

Clash City Farker

2012-12-12 01:07:50 PM

worlddan: so much stupid fail in that article.

(1) The majority of players in the game are females 25-45. Blizzard has talked about that in the past and outside research has confirmed it.

This is all I need to know. I am resubscribng today.

Raw_fishFood

2012-12-12 01:20:37 PM

roc6783: Raw_fishFood: Don't lose your virginity to a WoW slut.

Lesson learned.

Go on...

She'll give you a fun and kinky couple of nights, break your heart, then fly out to California to fark another guy from your guild.

tgambitg

2012-12-12 01:22:39 PM

kab: What kind of hardware are we talking about? It's always changing, obviously, but Data Center Knowledge, a trade journal that covers such things, reported that as of 2009, World of Warcraft required 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cores, 112.5 terabytes of memory, and 1.2 petabytes of storage.

Interesting. From a geek standpoint, I'd be curious as to why they still have the need to do weekly maintenance, or at least not have some sort of a/b setup.

A couple of things... for an a/b setup, for failover when doing maintenance, You;'d need twice as many servers. Plus, all the servers update in real time, so you'd have to be constantly adding data to the down servers databases. If you didn't want to do that, you'd need some downtime to copy the data over, you can't do that in real-time while the servers are back up, because the data is constantly changing. Databases (WoW is just a complex XML database) need downtime to compact and correct any errors in the data that creep in. Also, sometimes the servers just need to be rebooted. There is a lot of data flowing through the memory of the blades, and you need a hard reset every once in a while. With the size and complexity of the WoW databases and servers, it's a lot cheaper and easier to just take them down and do the maintenance that way.

sprawl15

2012-12-12 01:23:28 PM

Clash City Farker: worlddan: so much stupid fail in that article.

(1) The majority of players in the game are females 25-45. Blizzard has talked about that in the past and outside research has confirmed it.

This is all I need to know. I am resubscribng today.

That study is based on whose name is on the credit card - usually the player's mom.

roc6783

2012-12-12 01:27:12 PM

Raw_fishFood: roc6783: Raw_fishFood: **snip**

She'll give you a fun and kinky couple of nights, ***snip***

Let's start with a deeper description on this part, and worry about the other stuff if there's time.

Raw_fishFood

2012-12-12 01:30:33 PM

roc6783: Raw_fishFood: roc6783: Raw_fishFood: **snip**

She'll give you a fun and kinky couple of nights, ***snip***

Let's start with a deeper description on this part, and worry about the other stuff if there's time.

My first time was my first time with bondage, and I am just gonna leave it at that.

kab

2012-12-12 01:31:43 PM

tgambitg: A couple of things... for an a/b setup, for failover when doing maintenance, You;'d need twice as many servers. Plus, all the servers update in real time, so you'd have to be constantly adding data to the down servers databases. If you didn't want to do that, you'd need some downtime to copy the data over, you can't do that in real-time while the servers are back up, because the data is constantly changing. Databases (WoW is just a complex XML database) need downtime to compact and correct any errors in the data that creep in. Also, sometimes the servers just need to be rebooted. There is a lot of data flowing through the memory of the blades, and you need a hard reset every once in a while. With the size and complexity of the WoW databases and servers, it's a lot cheaper and easier to just take them down and do the maintenance that way.

Makes sense.... thanks for that!

tgambitg

2012-12-12 01:35:35 PM

kab: tgambitg: A couple of things... for an a/b setup, for failover when doing maintenance, You;'d need twice as many servers. Plus, all the servers update in real time, so you'd have to be constantly adding data to the down servers databases. If you didn't want to do that, you'd need some downtime to copy the data over, you can't do that in real-time while the servers are back up, because the data is constantly changing. Databases (WoW is just a complex XML database) need downtime to compact and correct any errors in the data that creep in. Also, sometimes the servers just need to be rebooted. There is a lot of data flowing through the memory of the blades, and you need a hard reset every once in a while. With the size and complexity of the WoW databases and servers, it's a lot cheaper and easier to just take them down and do the maintenance that way.

Makes sense.... thanks for that!

I dabbled a bit in DBA before settling on the network side of things... While I'm competent at DBA, I hate it. So I understand why they do maintenance.

Magorn

2012-12-12 01:55:09 PM

#13 I've been using this handle more or less continuously in various contexts since 1986 so It is NOT based o the name of the innkeeper in Bouldercrag Refuge, though I DO have to admit that he bears some resemblance to me in real life, making me wonder who I know who works for Blizzard

Amberwind

2012-12-12 02:13:02 PM

On the plus side, they have gotten remarkably faster at doing the maintenance over the years. Back in Vanilla, the servers would all go down at the same time, for at least 4 hours. I remember one rather torturous session where the server all my main toons were on was down for 14 hours, and since I was unemployed at the time I was bored out of my skull. Now, they rotate the server maintenance so there's usually a few realms up during the maintenance period, and it's been a long time since I've seen them go down for maintenance for more than 30 minutes.

Gunderson

2012-12-12 02:26:27 PM

worlddan: so much stupid fail in that article.

(1) The majority of players in the game are females 25-45. Blizzard has talked about that in the past and outside research has confirmed it.
(2) Yeah, he's an old guy but arguably the most famous person to play WoW is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Walken

he plays a Moonkin in PvP no less.

So can we get beyond this wow=teenage makes BS. I know it sells page views but it's flat out wrong.

I don't think that the wiki entry about Walken is too accurate. I've read in multiple articles that Christoper Walken is a Technophobe and doesn't even own a PC.

LINK

Also, Adrianna Curry Playing WOW:

And Jonathan Davis' (Korn) has his own guild ChildrenoftheKorn

Girion47

2012-12-12 02:33:12 PM

Raw_fishFood: roc6783: Raw_fishFood: Don't lose your virginity to a WoW slut.

Lesson learned.

Go on...

She'll give you a fun and kinky couple of nights, break your heart, then fly out to California to fark another guy from your guild.

My wife hooked up with the Guild Leader's wife.

It was pretty awesome.

RDixon

2012-12-12 02:47:30 PM

still plays.

Jedekai

2012-12-12 03:15:47 PM

Chunks McGunks: Stop being pussies. Get an EVE account so I can blow you up.

NN-UO-A:O-EQ-GW-WoW-EvE.

Yeah; I've been playing MMOs for a while.

roc6783

2012-12-12 03:19:20 PM

Girion47: Raw_fishFood: roc6783: Raw_fishFood: ***snip***

My wife hooked up with the Guild Leader's wife.

It was pretty awesome.

This thread has taken a fantastic turn.

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