World of Warcraft Updated

ByMike Moffit

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.

Similar Posts

  • Canned Air and FileVault

    by Matt, matt@smalldog.com The Internet is abuzz with a story about freezing RAM to “capture” its contents in order to obtain encryption keys….

  • AppleCare + is an Essential Value

    You may have received an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch for the holidays. These devices all come with a 1-year warranty and 90…

  • AppleCare…To the Rescue

    While Apple’s products have significantly lower rates of failure than a lot of their competition, things do go wrong from time to time. When I got my iPhone 4S at launch, it would occasionally restart itself. At first, I thought nothing of it, considering I was coming from an Android device that rebooted itself so often that it might as well have been saying, “Hey, just in case you forgot you customized your splash screen, here it is again!”

    A couple of weeks ago, my phone didn’t just restart itself, but became a useless brick until I gave it a hard reset while plugged in. A quick Google search revealed this issue to be a symptom of hardware failure known in the diagnosis log as “panic.plist.” I checked my diagnosis log and there it was, three “panic.plist” occurrences in the past week. After a brief phone call with AppleCare, I was given the choice of sending the phone back to them and waiting close to a week for a replacement or to have a $730 hold placed on my credit card while they sent me a new phone overnight. As I didn’t have another phone to use, I opted for the latter.

    Normally, to have a phone sent overnight would cost $30 but because I had AppleCare, the fee was waived. Cut to today; the hold has been lifted and I have a shiny new iPhone that has yet to give me an issue. Granted, I was within the original one year warranty, but had this happened after that first year, I would be scavenging Craigslist for a cheap replacement. Thanks, AppleCare–I owe you one.

  • New Stuff From Apple? All In Good Time

    Aside from Steve Job’s health and the release of the Verizon iPhone 4, Apple news and product updates have hit a relative stand-still…

  • The Apple iPhone

    Ever since the Steve Job’s keynote at MacWorld in January I knew that I had to have an iPhone. A few days after…