A Little Love for the Lushman

Last night I had my first full raid with Half-Baked, the feral druid giving me a run for my money.

I can safely say that, after making amends with HB, he and I can peacefully coexist in the same raid. All seems to be well on this front.

3DRealms has, apparently, already shut its doors.What many consider the world's premiere Vaporware developer has, well, vaporized. In a way, it serves 3DRealms right. Over ten years after announcement, we still do not have a proper Duke Nukem sequel. And what we have seen of this new Duke Nukem game, in its latest form, has been less than appealing.

I have been an FPS lover since I first had to fend against dogs, nazis, and a Hitler in a mech. They have been a regular diet of my game playing experience from that point forward. Duke Nukem 3D, in particular, holds a very special place in my heart. It took all of the greatest things about the Doom series and applied a shiny coat of "time to kick ass and chew bubblegum," though it was clearly all out of gum.

Just to date myself, I had used to play Doom modem-to-modem on a 9800 baud modem. Duke Nukem 3D, however, took advantage of my screaming 14.4k modem. I remember being blown away by how much quicker it was.

And how could I forget the times my mother would pick up the phone, only to hear the robotic squeals of a modem connection dying?

Really, in a lot of ways, it saddens me to hear the news of 3D Realms closing its doors. They had made so many games that I enjoyed so much: Terminal Velocity, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Max Payne, and Max Payne 2.

Here's to hoping some competent company picks up the rights to the newly announced Max Payne 3, as well as Duke Nukem Forever.

To keep in line with the WoW theme of this forum, it seems the Bear's best-in-slot weapon just got a whole lot harder to get:

The current arena rating system allows more players to have higher ratings in the 2v2 bracket when compared to 3v3 and 5v5. We are preparing an in-game update that will be improving the rating system of the 3v3 and 5v5 brackets to allow all three of the brackets to have a similar number of players able to achieve ratings on par with what’s currently possible in our 2v2 arena bracket. As a result, we are changing the personal and team rating requirements for the item level 239 weapons from 2200 to 2350, but keep in mind the tooltip will continue to show the requirement as 2200 until patch 3.1.2.

As a result of the above improvements, this change will prevent an excessive number of players from reaching much higher ratings and acquiring the highest grade of weapons in-game. The increase in rating requirements is designed to keep the number of players able to obtain these arena weapons on par with the number of players who are able to obtain the same grade of weapons from Heroic Ulduar.

When Arena Season 7 launches we plan to return the highest rated season 7 weapons back to 2200 while also ensuring that the difficulty in achieving that rating is closer to what is intended, yet of similar difficulty for all brackets (rather than being easier for 2v2).

Until the next Faerie Fire pull...

-Lushious