I couldn’t help it. I had to do it. I needed to know. I had to know. I grabbed the World of Warcraft leaked alpha via BitTorrent. The almost 2 gigs of data took almost a day and a half. I had to extract it a few times just to get all the files out un corrupted. At one point I had only 30 mb’s left on my 80 gig hard drive.

Of course the question one may ask is why download this alpha leak? You can’t play the game on Blizzard’s servers. So you have a worthless directory that weighs in at 2 gigs. And this would be rue if it wasn’t for some creative people on the internet. And before you get all excited, you can only walk around the world. Thats it, nothing else. But man what a world.

My biggest worry and the main reason I even got this alpha leak was to see if it would run on my current pc. And it does I’m happy to say. Did I mention the beautiful world? I personally really like the look of the world. It’s just so more epic feeling than the other mmorpg’s out there.

But keep in mind this leak does not reflect on the gameplay of the game Blizzard is making. I have faith in them and I am even more convinced this game is the mmorpg for me. But as with all things, only time will tell. Also keep in mind I will not help you get the alpha leak. I won’t tell you where to get the “sandbox” hack. I did it myself and so can you if you try.

So I’ve been quiet and have not updated in a while. Mostly I’ve been getting used to working 40 hours a week, every week again. I have to learn how to manage my free time better. Which should be something I can do. I only work eight hours a day now. So it should be pretty simple getting a schedule together for my time not at work.

I’m slowly losing interest in Dark Age of Camelot. I hate to say it. The grind is just become unbearable. All I need is eight bubs of experience. But the energy just isn’t there. I hate to bring up World of Warcraft again. But it just sounds like the grind won’t be as bad. The way it sounds so far is that quests will be a big part of the game. Just go and take a look at the WoW Quest page, and tell me you can’t see the difference in WoW and how other mmorpg’s handle quests. Just look at these screen shots below:

Perhaps downloading the alpha leak was a bad idea. Not because it’s leaked software (and yeah that’s bad too). Just wandering the world these guys have made makes me want the game more than I ever did. For me it seems the perfect game of this genre. The beta test is supposed to start soon, at least the sign up for the beta will start soon. I would give my left nut to get into the beta for World of Warcraft.

My obsession for World of Warcraft builds. I can’t stop following the development of this game. I check the official Beta and the Non Beta forums on a daily basis. I just can’t get enough details about this game.

I just can’t get enough screen shots to satisfy my desire to play the game. This place in particular is really cool. It has some great screen shots journal style that shows off some of the neat things you will find in the game.

And this site I just can’t stop watching. It’s a really cool page that refreshes every 10 seconds and shows screen shots live from the game being played. The shots above are from the live “WoW TV” they got going on. I want to play the beta now! I don’t want to wait for it to go into the open beta.

Woot! I’m in the World of Warcraft beta! I’ve been playing since around 9 am and just quit only because the servers went down for maintenance. I’ve already made level 5 and I got to say it is as fun as I hoped. Below are four screenshots showing off the game:

I got to take a nap now or I’ll be dead at work tonight. Questing is a huge part of the game just like the previews said. It’s cool how once you get high enough level you get a quest to go visit a region you have not been to yet. Also cool is that you get experience for exploring new regions. Lot of cool things in the game. Already it seems polished enough to be retail right now. And it runs like a dream even at a resolution of 1280×1024. Man I’ll probably never log onto Dark Age of Camelot again. Just kidding. Time for my nap.

So I rolled an undead rogue to see what World of Warcraft offered in the world of stealthers and liked what I saw. Like the warrior class you have combat moves (like Camelot’s styles). The neat thing about the rogue is that he has what they call finishing moves. These are special styles that you can only use after you build up a certain number of combo points. Certain styles give combo points when you use them. Now the more combo points you have the more damage the finishing move will do. If you look at the screenshot number seven you can see the five little circles indicating how many combo points you have earned.

Stealth works the way I imagine it works in all of these kinds of mmorpg’s. I’ll play around a bit more with this class so I can see what higher levels bring to it. So far I really enjoy it. And I’m not usually the kind of guy that plays a thief/stealther type of character. Check out the official rogue class page for a good rundown on what this class can do.

So who is sick of the touchy feely shit? I know I am. Time for me to go on again about World of Warcraft. I think everyone knows by now I’m in the beta and that I love the game. Well now I got my own WoW TV thing, which can be found over here. I only really play during the morning hours. You can tell if I’m playing if the the little box on the left has in game image. If it has a WoW login screen I’m not playing. Below are some screen caps taken from my little WoW TV thing:

Blizzard released a patch yesterday and you can read about here in the patch notes. The biggest thing this patch for players is the return of Talents. Talents (shown in that second screen) allow you to customize your character a little bit. So that each player class can be a little different. With this patch only warriors and mages have talents to buy. It works a little like Camelots specs or even closer to Diablo 2’s skill system. The warrior has Protection, Fury, and Arms to choose from in the talents menu. Protection has different choices that affect armor class. Fury is about giving you a chance to go crazy thus improving your chance to crit. And finally Arms gives you bonuses in the different weapon categories.

Also with this patch the game now has an auction system (third screen) that allows players to buy and sell items. There are auction npc’s in the big cities that allow you to use this system. It costs you a minor fee (it’s refundable) to place an item up for auction and once you sell it there is another fee (non refundable) based on the selling price.

My human warrior is now level 12 and I’m enjoying him way to much. I can solo mobs at least two level ahead of me. And it’s not really a problem taking on two at once as screens shots 5-7 show. At some point I have to get back to the other classes so I can report on how they are. I’ll have more to say later and be sure to ask questions in the forum thread for this post.

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.