World of Warcraft Updated

I know I’ve written about World of Warcraft many times before but there was just a major update to the game. The new update introduces tons of new features in anticipation for the expansion pack coming out this January.

One of the most notable changes is the PvP system and how it all works. Instead of using the kills to show your rank they will be made into points that you can spend and get new items, armor and weapons. Your points will not degrade over time as they did before. So you can join the battlegrounds, get loads of points, take a couple weeks off and when you return you’ll still have your points. The points are given to you every night, unlike last time where you had to wait weekly to receive the rewards.

The next change is the talents that each class gets. There have been tons of new talents added. Players have also been given a free re-spec so you can rebuild your talent tree without having to pay a fee as you normally would.

The last major update that I’ve noticed and used is the Looking For Group tool. With 30,000 people playing with me it’s hard to find other people who are questing when the chat channel is loaded with spam and other non-Looking For Group talk. The new tool lets you choose the dungeon or area you’re questing in and you can add a comment to your request. It will then match you with other people who have requested the same thing and you can be on your way. it’s very easy to use and clears up a lot of the spam that was happening in the chat channels.

Some bugs that have been fixed on Macintosh are:

• Added support for Multi-Threaded OpenGL on Intel Macs running OS X 10.4.8 or higher. Depending on hardware, scene and graphical settings, this can raise frame rates up to a factor of 2X.
• Improved video hardware detection and default settings, especially with Intel video.
• Vertex Animation Shaders have been disabled for systems with Intel video.
• Improved iTunes key-binding feature for smoothness and track name display.
• Fixed a bug where Tutorial Tips would not be marked as viewed correctly on PowerPC Macs.
• Fixed a rare crash bug in the audio code.
• Improved support for Weather Shaders.
• Added support for changing the mouse sensitivity in WoW. Previously, the Mac version ignored the value from the slider in the Interface Options dialog.

Read more about the v2.0 patch.
Grab a copy of World of Warcraft.
Pre-Order The Burning Crusade expansion pack.