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Nobar asked:

Any idea if Blizzard ever will implement a native linux client? I know that we have workarounds but i’d prefer a native one.

It is unlikely that World of Warcraft will get a native Linux client release. The numbers are just not there, most likely, and the development time for such a project could potentially be astronomic. Commenter JKWood made the point that the new 64-bit WoW client works very well with Wine 1.4-rc4 for Linux in a WoW64 setup, so that sounds like something you might want to try if your Linux WoW install isn’t performing as optimally as you’d like. Maybe we can draw some attention to the subject matter here and get a discussion going in the comments, and you might even want to try the official support forums.

hokiebuddy asked:

Why doesn’t blizzard offer rewards to players who’ve subscribed to wow for a long period of time? I’ve had a regular subscription going on 7 years now soon and I feel its a bit of a slight since I’ve been so loyal to their product. Maybe a mount after 5 years of game time, or a free pet or something would be nice. At least would show that they appreciate your loyalty and business. I know other games do this why doesn’t blizzard? After they just so large they don’t feel they need to, or is there some other reason?

Timed loyalty rewards are a great way to keep subscribers active and bring in people who might have left a long time ago. A yearly tiered system based on when you created your account could be pretty cool. That means all of those 7-year-old accounts that haven’t been active in many years could be eligible for really cool rewards for their characters. Make everything account-bound, and you’re set.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome.

Blizzard recently promised to release a flurry of Mists of Pandaria information in March, but apparently it’s opened the gates early. The Mists of Pandaria talent calculator and ability list received a massive update this week, giving us new info on the talents and spells that holy paladins can look forward to in Mists. In addition, the Blizzard community managers have been answering questions about the new data at a rapid-fire rate.

Holy paladins have a lot to look forward to in Mists. It’s clear that the developers have been looking at our weaknesses as healers, as several of our long-standing issues have been addressed. While we’ve always had a wide variety of utility abilities, until recently, holy paladins really only had single-target heals at their disposal. With the introduction of the revamped Holy Radiance in late Cataclysm and now the new talent options we’ll in Mists, our base healing toolbox is looking more and more complete.

Cataclysm: The age of integration

Death knights, to put it lightly, didn’t have a huge part in Cataclysm itself. For the most part, we may be able to assume that most death knights stayed in Northrend to help with containment and cleanup of the last of the Scourge, but of course, we don’t see any of that. We have been told that the Ebon Blade, along with the Argent Crusade, is keeping an eye on Sylvanas, but unfortunately, they don’t take much direct action as a group.

Luckily, we’re not left bereft of any death knight development. Two of the more prominent death knights, Thassarian and Koltira, are now generals in their respective factions’ armies and have come to clash at Andorhal. This, at least, implies a certain few things about the status of death knights in Horde and Alliance society.

It is certainly true that death knights were noted as barely trusted in the Wrath era, but in Cataclysm, we see two death knights as generals at the heads of rather important armies at Andorhal in Western Plaguelands, and there’s no sign of dissension or distrust in their ranks. While there’s always the chance of small pockets of people who still hate the death knights for their ties to the Scourge, the death knights’ actions in Northrend seem to have essentially earned us some amount of respect and trust among our faction.

Lich Queen Rising: Death knights vs. Sylvanas

Of course, possibly the biggest story hook for death knights comes at the end of the Andorhal quest line. Thassarian and Koltira, acting in remembrance of their brotherhood as members of the Knights of the Ebon Blade, have been trading truces and peace agreements to allow each other to rest up, fight fresh, and fight fair.

Sylvanas, as one might expect, is having none of that, and captures Koltira in some kind of controlling spell, prompting Thassarian to vow to rescue him. This, of course, brings up quite a few questions. Will Thassarian be joined by others of the Ebon Blade? Will there a split between the Horde and Alliance death knights, in which the question of whether death knights are ultimately more loyal to the Ebon Blade or their own factions is called into question?

It’s a troubling yet underpublicized fact that four out of five shadow priests respecced shadow for the first time after experiencing a romantic break-up. Recent studies shomore conventional typw that priests are 63% more likely to respec shadow within 72 hours of a break-up, while a separate poll found that 78% of healing priests had seriously considered respeccing to shadow after having an argument with their spouse or significant other. To the tenderhearted healing priest, shadow probably seems like a quick way to steel yourself and mend a broken heart; unfortunately, too few priests realize the two points they’re putting into Masochism ’til they’re staring down into an empty bottle of Volcanic Potion and wishing they could do the same DPS as a warlock.

The simple way to avoid all these drastic courses of action is, of course, to skip getting your heart broken in the first place. Easier said than done, you think? Perhaps, but knowing the battlefield of love will certainly help you avoid the more obvious pitfalls. Want to know what your best match is? What about your worst? This week, I’ve got the answers in a special guide to the classes.

Warriors: Rage or passion?

A warrior is without doubt a class that wears its heart on its sleeve. Once stricken with love, warriors will make their feelings obvious to you and everyone around them. Be wary, however; their propensity toward emotional display also comes at a cost — they do not hide their anger or jealously well. If you’re the type of priest who likes to flirt, a warrior probably isn’t for you.

Warrior tanks in particular can often be big control freaks. This might come off as overbearing to some priests, while others will find it complements their need for security and stability. Disc priests in particular may have trouble living up to the expectations of a warrior tank, since many prefer a more conventional type of healer and think absorption is extremely improper.

Two types of guilds in WoW are having the most difficulty right now: 25-man raiding guilds and new guilds of every sort. For officers, competing against established, max-level guilds can be incredibly daunting. Success in this game is never a sure thing. However, you can take steps to help your guild to survive and grow.

1. Establish your credentials.

You are the face of this new enterprise. Asking players to give up all their shiny perks is a big deal these days — bigger, honestly, than I ever thought it would be. Luring people away from that into your brand new organization all hinges on their confidence in you and the other officers. They can’t just assume you have a plan and the background to pull it off. They have to know.

You wouldn’t buy a car designed by a guy who never learned how to drive. Likewise, players aren’t going to join your guild if it’s clear to them that you don’t have the appropriate level of experience.

That level is different depending on what sort of guild you’re creating. If it’s a raiding guild or a PvP guild, you should know how to do those things at a competent or above-average level. Confidence in you will inspire confidence in the guild, but the reverse is also true. If players see you as a weak or uninformed player, they may bail on the guild at the first sign of trouble.

Social guilds don’t require the same set of skills. Your best credentials are your experience with MMOs. That way, players know that you have experience dealing with different personalities in an online world, where it’s often very different than real life.

Leadership in any setting can inspire confidence in you as a guild leader or officer. This experience can come from sources you might not immediately think of, such as teaching a class or raising children. My first leadership experiences came from serving as a senior patrol leader in the Boy Scouts.

2. Don’t focus only on recruitment.

It doesn’t do any good to add new players if you can’t keep the ones you have. A revolving door roster doesn’t get you anywhere. Recruiting is important in the early going, of course, but so is retention.

Don’t spend all of your time recruiting. Make sure that there are enough guild events and activities that the players you already have are satisfied.

The first time someone gquits because there isn’t enough going on, everyone else is going to start thinking about it, too.

3. Don’t lower your standards for guild experience or achievements.

In the beginning, it can be incredibly frustrating to see the slow pace of your guild’s leveling. You’ll be tempted to bring in anyone with a pulse just to increase the rate. This is a mistake.

Recruiting carelessly by inviting anyone who’s interested can backfire on you badly. When you bring one person into the guild who causes problems or annoys people, you could lose 10 as a result.

Of course, you can’t always know ahead of time when a recruit is going to stir up trouble. That brings me to the next point.

4. Settle drama quickly and decisively.

New guilds, particularly in this era of perks, are incredibly fragile. Any negative situation that arises in the early stages of a guild can destroy it.

You may question when it’s appropriate for you to get involved. Down the road, after the guild has grown larger and more confident, you will have the luxury of letting people settle their own differences when possible. At this point, however, you can’t afford that.

Don’t be afraid to ask someone to leave the guild or even gkick them if you feel like it’s best for the organization as a whole. Yes, that will mean slower leveling, but you’ll risk a lot more than that if you keep them around.

5. Empower your entire guild to help you recruit.

By this, I don’t mean give every guild rank the power to invite. Rather, encourage members to talk to players on the server and elsewhere about joining. In WoW today, you need all hands on deck.

Too often, the average guild member sees recruiting as a job for the officers. They feel like it’s not their place to do so, that they’re stepping on the officers’ toes. Make sure they know that it’s not just OK to help with recruiting — it is, in fact, essential.

I would actually argue that it can be more effective for nonofficers to talk to players about the guild. Players will think, “Hey, this player is just a regular guild member, but she’s willing to spend time talking to me about it. She must really like this guild.”

6. Use the Raid Finder to your advantage.

If your goal is to become a raiding guild, you may not have the critical mass you need to raid as a guild right away. The Raid Finder is perfect for your situation.

However, don’t let your guild members settle for a typical Raid Finder experience. Get a Vent server to allow ease of communication among your members. Don’t share it with the rest of the raid if you don’t want to. The point of it in this case isn’t to coordinate the raid but to let your members get to know each other better.

This way, you can turn what is often viewed as an anti-social experience into just the opposite. Voice communication helps people to grow closer and feel more like a community. Sure, you’re depending on other players to progress through the instance. As long as your guildmates are all there with you, however, the experience will feel more like a guild activity.

If there’s someone in the raid that you’re targeting as a recruit, privately invite them into your Vent server. You’ll get a great sense of whether they’ll fit into your guild.

WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of Battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who spends most of her time in Azeroth as a restoration shaman turning people into frogs.

Unless you’ve been living in the little cave on Darkmoon Island for the past few months (and frankly, if you have, well done — that must be one awesome time machine!), you’ll have heard about the impending expansion. I previously posted a short plea for WoW Insider readers to head over to Blizzard MVP Eldacar’s thread asking for PvP feedback over on the official forums, and it got me thinking about what I would love to see from PvP in Mists of Pandaria.

Now, I’m excited about the upcoming changes that Blizzard is talking about; you’ve no doubt seen the information over on Battle.net. Resilience as a baseline stat sounds pretty great to me and will make PvP at lower-level brackets a bit more fun, but I’m curious to see how Blizzard’s going to scale it within those brackets. If it scales with level, then a level 64 is going to have an even easier time beating up a level 60 and basically being a one-toon killing machine. And this won’t serve to help PvP at lower levels at all, although it will make entry into max-level PvP a lot easier.

And the new Battlegrounds look interesting, the proposed Valley of Power BG especially, because the premise is pretty simple. I don’t think overcomplicated Battlegrounds that require complex player-environment interaction are the most fun. I prefer simple maps that place the emphasis on, you know, killing the opposite faction. There’s a term for that, I’m sure … Oh, yeah. PvP!

But I’m thinking big, ladies and gentlemen, really big — Azerothian-moon-on-a-stick big. Now, a brief disclaimer: This is fantasy from the deranged mind of an Englishwoman and certainly not a scoop of exciting early news. I’m just throwing this out there!

PUGs. We’ve all done them. In my guild, puggers are some of the most complained-about people in the game. Much as they are probably perfectly reasonable, lovely people, something about being put into a group of randomly selected strangers to perform a cooperative task doesn’t always bring out the best in players.

5-man Dungeon Finder PUGs follow a predictable pattern through patches. At the beginning of the patch, when the content is fresh and new and (in some cases) difficult, puggers are talkative, helpful and generally more friendly. You just wiped to Queen Azshara? “Hey,” a DPSer might say, “we should kill the Hand of Azshara as priority.” “Ah, I see,” the tank replies. “I didn’t know — sorry, I’ll put a skull on it.”

Now, that may well be either my being lucky with a PUG I was healing or my memory distorting past events. However, it seems that as patches progress, talking in PUGs becomes ever rarer and ever less kind. At this point, you’re lucky to get a “hi” at the start of your PuG, and if anyone does talk about the Hand of Azshara, it’s most likely just someone spammming a macro that yells “HAND.” I think the same behavior holds true in the Raid Finder, too.

As you may have noticed, I am a talkative soul and often try to chat in PUGs. I’m generally ignored … but it hasn’t stopped me yet! So would I drive you round the bend? Are you just there to get a job done and don’t care for pleasantries or making a connection with strangers you’ll likely never encounter again? Or do you long for a bit more conversation? Is silence golden in PUGs?

Also, a personal gripe — is it so hard to reply “r” when asked “r”?

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With the introduction of cross-realm raiding in patch 4.3.2 and the Raid Finder, players have gone above and beyond in creating new and exciting server-less communities that bring in raiders from all over the world via Real ID grouping. While the Dragon Soul raid is not available currently for players using cross-realm raiding, all other raids and difficulties are, and there is no better time to go back to old content and finish off stuff during the wait until the next expansion.

Sites like LFRaid.com and Twitterland Raiding are two communities that have sprung up quickly in this new cross-realm raiding world. Twitterland Raiding is a website created for the Twitter WoW community to form up groups for raiding across server lines. With a centralized place to express interest in raiding as well as no server structure or logistics to worry about besides Real ID names (which gets immensely easier with the introduction of BattleTags), raiding can happen in greater volume and more quickly.

LFRaid.com is another site that has set up a system to advertise for raiding with a group in a cross-server community. The biggest difference between sites like these and guild recruiting sites is that they exist outside of the guild parameter. You do not have to spend money on a transfer as a new recruit to raid with a different group of people, and you skip that potentially expensive trial period that might not work out. LFRaid.com also has a great Teams Recruiting section that players can browse through to find a group that’s looking for a guy or girl just like you.

Choosing to create a community in a very different way, @vitaemachina on Twitter administers the Sleepy Hams public Mumble server. Originally created to streamline cross-realm raiding groups that wanted a place to use voice communication, Sleepy Hams has sort of taken on a life of its own.

Many people threw up their hands in protest over the Dungeon Finder’s unintended consequence of damaging server communities (or, in layman’s terms, asking in trade chat for two hours for a tank, because we thought that this was fun for over 10 years). Instead, we got a robust system of dungeon queuing that has been revised, tweaked, and added on to since halfway through Wrath of the Lich King. The Dungeon Finder and, by proxy, the Raid Finder may have potentially been among the most important innovations for the MMO genre to this day, if only because of how much content it made accessible to previously unknowing players. What these projects show is that no matter how much community you think Blizzard is removing, by adding features that greatly enhance accessibility, players will always find a way at creating communities with the people they want to play the game with.