Mists of Pandaria

[SurfD]

Seems like it.  Once you unlock an achieve with a reward (Mount, pet, title, etc) the entire account gets it (barring faction restrictions).  They were talking about level restricting some of them (so a level 2 character would have to level to 80 before they could wear any level 80 specific raid titles and whatnot), but no word on level restricting mounts in the writeup.

Yeah, that's good stuff... I was more interested about getting mounts and pets to count for the 'x mounts' and 'x pets' achievements, though. If you have 9 pets on char A and 7 pets on char B [4 of which char A also has], do you get the 10 pets achievement for your account?

The X pets achieves are gone (replaced with a slew of new assorted achieves related to pet battles).

They mentioned however that some achieves (like get X number of Honorable Kills / complete X number of daily quests) would actually use your account sum total in working those out (so you can PvP on ALL toons now, and the kills count globally).  I imagine the same will work for any Collect X mounts / hats / whatever achieves.

[luckton]

The reason the "collect x pets" thing is gone is because you can now have multiple copies of any given pet in your collection, and level/skill them up individually.

So, yeah, I plan on having an entire team of Mini Diablos 

[Merusk]

Wait, what?

You mean multiple pets on your team, not in your collection, right?  All my Diablo Stones, etc say "Already Known" with no option to re-learn them.

[luckton]

Wait, what?

You mean multiple pets on your team, not in your collection, right?  All my Diablo Stones, etc say "Already Known" with no option to re-learn them.

/shrug.  Maybe it's a bug then.  From what I've seen thus far, the mounts and pets from my characters that I copied over and created have shared the same mount/pet collection.  This resulted in multiple copied of my Collector Edition pets showing up in the list.

[Merusk]

Yeah, that's a bug.  There's all kinds of bugginess with the system right now, as mentioned previously.  Hell, even when they aren't wiped some of my characters have companions they shouldn't and are missing ones they should. (My Ghostly Skull, for example, is missing on all characters.  But I picked-up a CCG pet I shouldn't have.)

[Simond]

My plan is to roll a Space Goat Monk on launch (and why the hell not?  ).  To that end, I rolled a Pandaren just to see the starter zone and run the quests.  Do not click spoiler if you don't want to spoil your Pandaren starting experience.

You missed the part where you go to join the Alliance and King Slab Rockfist

[Rokal]

You missed the part where you go to join the Alliance and King Slab Rockfist

As if leaving the new content and going back to Stormwind/old-world content wasn't enough of a come down, this scene sucked. The king starts rambling on about how you can't be friends with horde Pandas and that you'll be expected to kill them. Your Panda faction leader just says "oh okay" like it was nothing. Maybe the transition will work once they have the video in, but it's pretty awful right now.

[luckton]

Ah well, I can still get a team of CE pets together  

You missed the part where you go to join the Alliance and King Slab Rockfist

They really did do a nice polish job on the Pandaren models.  Reminds me of Pixar/DreamWorks style.  I mean, look at this video Oxhorn put together.  Besides another nice piece by Ox, it shows some nice examples of the Pandaren in action...the social emotes, combat, etc.  Would   for them to go back and retouch the other races in such a way, but I doubt it'll happen for a while.

[luckton]

Combing through today's beta notes.  For the Hunter's out there, it took 6+ years and four expansions, but they finally fucking did it. 

 

[Hutch]

Combing through today's beta notes.  For the Hunter's out there, it took 6+ years and four expansions, but they finally fucking did it. 

 

I hope that performs an AoE loot

[luckton]

Pandaren /dances are out.

Males get LMFAO's "Party Rock"  

Females get Caramell's "Caramelldansen"  

[Paelos]

Never would have known about the female one. Is that obscure? It seems obscure.

[FieryBalrog]

Never would have known about the female one. Is that obscure? It seems obscure.

Semi popular meme circa 2006 or so

[Setanta]

Combing through today's beta notes.  For the Hunter's out there, it took 6+ years and four expansions, but they finally fucking did it. 

 

LOL - got Torchlight much? Now all they need is to be able to send the pet back to the city to sell trash loot/play the AH for you and Hunters will be godlike (and Warlocks and DKs will want it for their pets) :D

[Ironwood]

Combing through today's beta notes.  For the Hunter's out there, it took 6+ years and four expansions, but they finally fucking did it. 

 

Call me back when we have a pet bar that's bigger than a fleas kneecap.

[Fabricated]

Never would have known about the female one. Is that obscure? It seems obscure.

It's anime nerd shit. Any game/movie/etc popular enough to get major weeaboo notice tends to get a carmelldansen edit.

[Sjofn]

I don't care if it's some weeaboo meme shit, the female pandaren dance is totally cute.

I find how expressive their faces are (like the goblins) fascinating. I would seriously kill to get that sort of detail on the rest of the races.

[caladein]

They did revamp the skeletons for all the Monk stuff so there's hope.

[luckton]

Well, more like just added Monk-unique animations for the current models, but yeah.  The Blood Elf Monk animations are alright, but they seem a bit unnatural.

[Simond]

Well that, plus they've already said they're working on a model revamp.

[Ingmar]

Some pretty interesting technology at work here:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/5393667/Cross-Realm_Zones_Coming_to_Beta-5_10_2012

[luckton]

Some pretty interesting technology at work here:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/5393667/Cross-Realm_Zones_Coming_to_Beta-5_10_2012

Damn, was in the middle of posting that and got distracted while cooking 

Anywho, it sounds like an improvement to the cross-zoning tech DAoC had, which is a good thing.  Although since you can essentially solo everything in the world all the way up to Wrath (they kept the group quests for those zones that have them), it seems more of a novelty thing at this point.

Post edit: I'm not thrilled with the shared resource node thing; this will impact the market in weird ways.

[Merusk]

So, the 'nifty features' added in to WoW over the years always make me curious about their applications to Titan - assuming that project doesn't die.

What I gather from this is that they're testing their ability to link resources for one zone across multiple servers.  The final impact of that?  Removal of server cluster walls.

In essence, I'd say what we're seeing is that for Titan they're trying not to have realms but one world like EVE that load-balances itself.

About damn time.

[caladein]

Interesting thing mentioned with the last Q&A:

Q. What about zones that are already overpopulated, like new race starting zones?
With this technology, we can also flag zones to allow for more than one copy of that zone per realm. Players on that realm will be split among those copies in order to alleviate problems due to overpopulation.  Players won’t normally see or interact with those on a different instance of their zone, although joining a party will relocate all party members to a single instance of that zone.

Hopefully it's a little more transparent than phasing is now, but I'm constantly impressed with what Blizzard can do to a game that's going on eight years running.

[Lantyssa]

What I gather from this is that they're testing their ability to link resources for one zone across multiple servers.  The final impact of that?  Removal of server cluster walls.

Something like you have a home server, but you can play with friends whenever.  Why hadn't anyone thought of this?

[Rokal]

Something like you have a home server, but you can play with friends whenever.  Why hadn't anyone thought of this?

I think the idea is not to even have a home server: just instances of zones that everyone shares, which happen to be the same if you are grouped with friends. I think this is how DCUO currently works, and it's definitely where I hope things are heading. The work they did on battletags hints that it might be the plan for Titan.

[FieryBalrog]

You still have a home server in the sense of an Auction House and guilds doing current raid content.

Everything else in the game is basically shared at this point. Which is a good thing, anything that breaks down barriers to playing together is positive.

[Nevermore]

Interesting thing mentioned with the last Q&A:

Q. What about zones that are already overpopulated, like new race starting zones?
With this technology, we can also flag zones to allow for more than one copy of that zone per realm. Players on that realm will be split among those copies in order to alleviate problems due to overpopulation.  Players won’t normally see or interact with those on a different instance of their zone, although joining a party will relocate all party members to a single instance of that zone.

Hopefully it's a little more transparent than phasing is now, but I'm constantly impressed with what Blizzard can do to a game that's going on eight years running.

This particular part CoX has had since the beginning, although CoX has divided zones rather than the mostly seamless zones that WoW has.

[luckton]

Although since you can essentially solo everything in the world all the way up to Wrath (they kept the group quests for those zones that have them), it seems more of a novelty thing at this point.

Post edit: I'm not thrilled with the shared resource node thing; this will impact the market in weird ways.

Well, seems I'm not the only one that struck this same nerve.

Q: I really don't see any reason to group with others when everything is so easy to do at the lower levels. All these other people will be doing is killing my mobs and taking my resources.
The game is specifically designed with variable respawns, and huge influxes of players on launches. Having very few people in a zone is actually not what the game is supposed to be.

Well, fuck you then Blizz.  Bring back those awesome 3-5 man outdoor group quests if your intent is for us to run into each other then.

Also, I still say the resource sharing thing is going to skew server economies, and not in good ways.

[FieryBalrog]

The current implementation sounds like a bit of a clunky workaround of WoW's basic game design.

Are they really going to accomplish this without loading screens between adjacent zones?

[luckton]

The current implementation sounds like a bit of a clunky workaround of WoW's basic game design.

Are they really going to accomplish this without loading screens between adjacent zones?

I guess I should have pasted the other addendum FAQ:

Q: Will be have to zone to every zone from now on then?
No, it's as seamless as it is today.

So, yeah, we'll be seeing a lot of disappearing/reappearing people.

[Selby]

Also, I still say the resource sharing thing is going to skew server economies, and not in good ways.

Yeah, farming nodes on one server and visit your friends in another zone to share the loot...

[Ingmar]

Honestly, I really don't think level-up materials being shared across servers is going to matter at all.

[apocrypha]

Something like you have a home server, but you can play with friends whenever.  Why hadn't anyone thought of this?

I remember a certain HRose asking demanding stridently exclaiming about exactly this years ago. He repeatedly talked about how barriers were a bad thing and the server barriers in WoW was one that he bemoaned very loudly. As was his way.

[Setanta]

Screw cross-stealing of nodes - rare-spawn hunter pets could be a nightmare