If you pay for Fileplanet.com get over there now and sign up for the World of Warcraft Stress Test/Open Beta! Again this is for paying costumers of Fileplanet. If your not it’s only 7 or 8 bucks. And whatever you do make sure you say no thanks to the 15 buck quarterly rate they offer. Because the next page you get after saying no offers you 7.90 a month.

Holy shit! I got this e-mail today:

Greetings!

If you are receiving this email, you are one of the valued testers currently in World of Warcraft’s closed beta test. This message is to inform you that the beta servers will be coming down at 3:00 PM PDT on Friday, October 29 and will remain offline for a few days in preparation for another stress test. Your account and characters will be active for this stress test, but a new client download will be required. After the game servers come down on Friday the 29th, you will be able to log in to the community site and download the new client.

Once the beta-server preparations are complete, we will announce the start of the stress test, and the servers will come back online. When that happens, you will be able to log back in, download a quick patch, and then continue playing. Please keep an eye on WorldofWarcraft.com for more information about the stress test in the days ahead!

We want to take this opportunity to thank you for all the hard work you’ve been putting in to make World of Warcraft a better game. You’ve done a great job, and without you, the classes would not be where they are today, places like the Barrens would not be as rich as they are today, and the changes implemented from your suggestions would never have taken place.

We hope you’ve been enjoying your exclusive look at World of Warcraft these past few weeks and months, and we hope you’ll take some satisfaction in knowing that you’ve played a big part in shaping its destiny. We’ll see you again online soon!

Sincerely,

Blizzard Entertainment

I didn’t see this happening so soon. So another stress test is coming and then open beta? And then woot retail! Bye bye Camelot! See you all in Azeroth!

So I made it into my first instance of a dungeon today in World of Warcraft. I had logged into the closed beta server just to sell some stuff from the last time I played there. And it was just luck that a group was going into the Deadmines in Westfall to go after Van Cleaf. This is a big deal because you need one full group at the least to take on all the elite mobs in there. We passed through the shimmering blue portal and did really good until we met up with a goblin shredder.

The screen shots kind of speak for themselves in this case. One by one the party of two (levels 20 and 22) warrior and one (level 29) rogue met their doom and the sharp whirling blades of the goblin shredder. We never did make it to this Van Cleaf guy and it’s probably best. I think Van Cleaf and his men would have handed us our asses faster than the goblin shredder did. All in all it was a fun experience. Even though I died and took a exp loss (in the negative no less). I did manage to get a lot of nice loot that I will sell or send in the mail to my alts.

The World of Warcraft stress test beta is live and running. I had many worries about playing during this stress test. Some of these worries were put to rest. Some of them are just annoying.

I assumed that there would be one server. I could just imagine the lag on this one server in my mind. Thankfully there are quite a few servers to chose from. Both the normal and PvP servers are choices. Also I swear that performance on these stress test servers are much better than on the closed beta servers. I was getting over 100 fps on the stress test server I joined. On the beta server I get around 30-50 fps. Maybe Blizzard tweaked some stuff here and the next time I log in on the closed beta server it will be all good.

Now my biggest worry and something that just annoys the shit out of me is all of the god damn newbs playing this game. It’s just fucking chaos on this stress test server. The newb area is swarming with people. It’s standing room only around all of the mob camps. And the majority of these people must have never played a mmorpg before. Because their fucking clueless. All of the questions that fly by on the main chat channel are crazy. Where my trainer? Where is this? Where is that? Open your eyes and look around for christ sake.

And don’t get me wrong. I don’t claim to be a power gamer at all. But I don’t have a problem exploring around an area looking for shit. And sure you can say I’m in the closed beta and I already know all this shit. But I looked around and explored when I first got into the game on the closed beta. And World of Warcraft makes all of this stuff so easy. There is no reason a player has to be that lazy.

The funniest thing even with all of the people in the starting areas the game is still fun as hell. So far two of my fellow Dark Age of Camelot guildies are playing. With any luck we will have a guild going tomorrow. It’s only ten silver to get a guild charter and I feel that can be done by tomorrow. The problem will being getting enough people to sign the thing. I suspect I will be playing all day today. But what the hell I got nothing better to do.

Want to play World of Warcraft? Didn’t get accepted into the beta yet? Or maybe you never signed up for the beta? Well here is your chance:

In order to evaluate World of Warcraft‘s account-creation process and server performance under heavy loads, Blizzard will be conducting a seven-day stress test beta in the days ahead. This test will require over 100,000 players to download the World of Warcraft stress test beta client, create an account, and log on to play when the test goes live!

To make the client available for download to such a large audience, we have partnered with FilePlanet, GameSpy’s Web-based file-delivery service. Click here to learn more about the World of Warcraft stress test beta and to sign up for a chance to participate in this special event.

Head over to this forum post for more info and to find a FAQ on this FilePlanet stress test.

Well I have returned to the game Dark Age of Camelot. And don’t think for a second that I’m forgetting about World of Warcraft. It’s just that I’ve grown to used to the company of all the people in the guild I’m in. Playing WoW without them is just boring. So I decided last week that I would reactivate my account and start playing again. And it appears this was a good time to get back into the game. A huge patch just came out today that make some of the more painful parts of Camelot a little less painful. Which is good because I don’t like pain.

I also picked up my first artifact tonight thanks to some help from my friends. It’s called the Harpy’s Feather Cloak. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I got to find three scrolls to activate the damn thing. And on top of that once activated I have to level the artifact for it to get more special abilities. I just can’t wait.

But I’m happy to have something to do again in the game. For a long time my only goal was getting 50. And afterwords I felt like I no longer had a purpose in the game. Which was my own fault for wanting to hit 50 so bad. I still have all kinds of things to do. Like try out this new frontiers that I hear such bad things about. And of course I will continue to preach WoW to all the guildies.

I wasn’t going to do it. I said to myself I’ll never play it if I buy it. I figured how would I have time for any game other than World of Warcraft. Well I went into Best Buy and it called to me. I couldn’t resist I had to have it. I’m happy to say that Doom 3 by id Software was worth the wait.

Doom 3 is an amazing first person shooter (fps) and id is of course the kings of this genre as they prove with this game. It has to be the first id game with a god honest story in the game and not one paragraph in the game manual. Sure they take some elements from other games. Such as the way your PDA plays audio files and gets emails obviously lifted from System Shock 2.

But overall it just is an all around great gaming experience. The visuals have been talked about for years and there is no need to go into that here other than saying holy shit! Man it’s just fucking amazing. And the game is dark. Not just dark as in the creepy demons and hell that you expect from a Doom game. It’s just a combination of both the graphics and the sound. This is the second game that has freaked me out just a little.

And these screen shots above don’t do the game justice. I’m running the game at 1024×768 and with medium graphic quality selected. I also have tweaked the shit out of the game. I unpacked the pak4’s, I got the un-official ATI fix, the ATI beta 4.9 drivers, and of course modified my autoexec.cfg just to be safe. And for shits and giggles you can take a look at how the leaked version looked on my old computer right here.