Thursday, April 8, 2010

Popular hunter pet site Petopia

Tag:Hunter, Analysis / Opinion, News items, Guides

Here's a nice little bit of news for all leveling Hunters, people looking into starting a hunter alt, or people looking to switch out or tweak out their current pet: the popular depository of all things Hunter pet related in WoW, Petopia, has gotten a facelift and a few handy new reference pages. The quick links and references seem to be a lot more streamlined now, and it should be even easier to find information. Some pages are still making the transition, and some of the pet pictures have not been updated to the new color scheme, but Mania assures us she is working on that.

In the meantime, she's also added a few new pages to the library, namely the Retired Pet page and the "Fake" Pet Skills page. The former deals with formerly tamable pets that can no longer be tamed, while the latter deals with pet skills that are present during the newbie hunter taming quests, but not on any permanently tamed pet.

I rather like both of the new pages. Not only should the information be helpful (if sad) to any newbie wondering where they can get that awesome ghost wolf, but the pages were a nice walk down memory lane for this old hunter. I remember when I made first Tauren Hunter, I was always disappointed that Swoop wasn't an actual bird pet skill, and I was considering a pet crab for my Dwarf Hunter at one point, and would have loved to have a thorny pet to add a bit more damage and threat power for tanking. Crabs could probably use some love anyway, as they seem to be competing with the likes of Sporebats and Bears for most neglected pet family.

But anyway, if you're a Hunter, and you haven't checked out Petopia in a while, it's worth a look, there's some pretty cool stuff going on over there.

Petopia

Browse Pets

Cunning Pets

Ferocity Pets

Tenacity Pets

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Mania’s Arcania

Hunter pets in the World of Warcraft.

Happy Birthday to Warcraft Pets!

Warcraft Pets, the best WoW mini-pet site on the web, is celebrating its third birthday today!

Warcraft Pets is one of my favorite WoW sites. It combines an adorable but uncluttered look with exceptional functionality. (Check out my mini-pet collection!)

In addition, Warcraft Pets has been an inspiration to me for my own sites, including Warcraft Mounts and WoW Tabards.

I’ve chatted with Breanni, maven of mini-pets, several times and I’m always impressed by the time and effort she puts into her site. I have some conception of how time-consuming running a site can be, but … I am fundamentally lazy.

Breanni isn’t. She serves her community well.

So happy birthday, Warcraft Pets. May you enjoy many, many more!

Noblegarden: Sit Still Or Hop Madly?

Noblegarden has started! And it wasn’t five minutes before I saw the first bunny-on-bunny violence .. or at least excessive yelling and use of obscene language.

The problem, so far as I can tell, is that about have the population of any given realm believes that the “right” way to gather eggs is to find an egg spawn spot and sit in front of it until an egg spawns. That eggs is then “theirs” because they were specifically waiting for it.

The other half of the population believes that the “right” way to gather eggs is to hop frantically from spawn spot to spawn spot, grabbing any egg that happens to spawn and isn’t grabbed by someone else first. That egg is then “theirs” because at that point, it’s in their inventory.

Unfortunately, these two methods don’t necessarily work well together. When an egg spawns by a sitter and a passing hopper grabs it … well, there may be words. And regardless of your personal predilections, I find that too much yelling can get on my little bunny nerves.

Personally, I love hopping frantically … in general, I mean, not just when gathering eggs. There’s something about being a bunny that makes me want to hop about frantically, and it’s not just that I can’t mount up without dropping the shapeshift, either.

At any rate … try to have fun gathering your eggs. If you aren’t having fun, skip it. ~~There’s no title for Noblegarden and it’s not part of “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been” either.~~

Edit: Sheesh — I completely misread my Achievement panel. Noblegarden does have a title — “the Noble” and is part of “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been”. I apologize for the misinformation.

Thanks for catching me, Kestrel.

Hunter Pet Haiku – Popular Winners

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 5:29 pm UTC - Community

The voting for the most popular of the 43 (!) entries to the Hunter Pet Haiku Contest is finally over, and we have our winners!

As an aside: I have to keep putting the (!) after the number of entries, because I was expecting maybe 10, if I got lucky. I am thrilled that so many hunters decided to participate.

Hunter Pet Haiku – Popularity Run-Off

The first round of voting for the most popular haiku is done, which means that we’re ready for the run-off round!

The top three entries from this run-off vote will receive excessive applause and laudatory congratulation here, as well as a special forum title on the WoW Petopia Community forums if they happen to be a member.

Here are the nine run-off contestants:

Hunter Pet Haiku – Other Contestants

Last time we caught up with the winners of the random drawing portion of the Hunter Pet Haiku Contest. Today I wanted to spotlight the other 43 (!) entries.

At this point I am not going to attach names to the entries because I don’t want the votes turning into a personal popularity contest. *grin*

Feel free to discuss the entries in the comments, but do please be polite. In particular, I’ve decided to accept these entries as valid, so let’s not quibble about syllables.

Remember, if you want to vote you can either hit the forums or e-mail me and I’ll add your vote to the total.

So here, without further ado, are the rest of the haiku! (Yes, that rhymed.)

Hunter Pet Haiku – Game Time Winners

The Hunter Pet Haiku contest ended a mere 8 hours ago and I have already drawn and contacted the three random winners who will be receiving a free month of game time.

Since you can only win one of the two categories, these three are not eligible to win the popular vote. So I thought I’d share their haiku with everyone here, so you can appreciate it properly … and then go vote for your favorite haiku among all the entries on the WoW Petopia Community forums.

First, some fun numbers:

A total of 29 people entered the contest.
They submitted a total of 51 43 entries. (Multiple entries didn’t improve your chance in the random drawing, though. And you can only win once anyway.)
The most entries I got from any one person was 5. The average number entered was around 1.6-ish.
We’re going to have to run 5 voting polls on the forums to accommodate all the entries. After that, we’ll have a run-off poll to choose the most popular haiku.
It’s taken me five hours so far to get myself organized to post some, but not all, of the entries on the forums. This may well be because I am very tired right now.

Don’t Forget To Send Me a Haiku [updated]

And the haiku contest is closed!

I will be going through the approximately 30 entries tonight and getting them posted.

I’ll also be doing the drawing for the random winner and hopefully getting them posted on the forums as well.

This should be fun! You guys sent in some great entries.

[original post follows]

You have less than 24 hours to compose a stunning haiku about a hunter pet and send it in!

Haiku don’t take long to write, and you can win (somewhat) fabulous prizes and the approbation of your fellow hunters.

You can read more about the rules of the contest in my last post: Contest: Hunter Pet Haiku.

Contest: Hunter Pet Haiku

So it happens that I have a couple of months of free game time to give away.^*

I’ve been trying to think of an appropriate contest — something interesting but also easy. I wanted something creative, but I didn’t want it to be a huge hassle for anyone, including me. And honestly, I don’t want to have to judge anything creative because I know how creative you people are and I know I can’t choose between a whole bunch of great entries.

But last night as I was falling asleep I hit on the perfect thing: haiku.

Questing in Style

Mania in Watcher's Tunic Lately I’ve been lackadaisically working towards the Loremaster achievement on Mania. (I want the tabard.)

I finished up Outland and Northrend first because I find per-zone count of quests both convenient and satisfying, but now I am working on Kalimdor.

(As an aside, I’ve been posting some of my more pithy-but-certainly-not-interesting-enough-to-make-a-post-out-of thoughts about my travels on Twitter.)

Anyway, since I outlevel the content in Kalimdor by at least twenty levels, and usually more like fifty, I figured I’d do my questing in style.

Mania in Purple from Dustwallow Marsh Above and to the left is my favorite questing shirt right now: a Watcher’s Tunic from a level 68 group quest in Nagrand. On a female character, the color of the sleeve fabric changes to match your skin color, leaving you with a spiderweb or fishnet effect.

The sleeves flare out at the bottom, though … which looks a bit odd if the fabric is supposed to be skin. But a pair of gloves fixes that! I am still looking for a pair of pants and a pair of gloves that look really good with this tunic, but for the moment I’m just wearing it with my normal combat gear.

But that’s not my only questing outfit! I also have the purple pleasure that you see above and to the right: Mordant’s Travel Tunic and The Wanderer’s Cover (both courtesy of quests in Dustwallow Marsh).

Mania as Wonder Woman I know that you can put together some really nice purple outfits if you try, but I just happened to pick these two pieces up while I was doing quests in Dustwallow. Coincidence, or does Blizzard employ a fashion consultant for quest rewards?

And finally, for those times when I want to look like Wonder Woman, we have a Gleaming Scale Breastplate to the left, also from Dustwallow Marsh.

My thanks to Letters From Birdfall, by the way, for a recent ‘Outfit of the Month’ post that got me thinking about my own outfits again.

In Praise of Cooperation

One of the things that has always bugged me about World of Warcraft is how the trumped-up hostilities between the Horde and the Alliance interferes with cooperative gameplay.

Okay, yeah, there’s PvP and that’s supposed to be a decent chunk of the game. And yes, sure, there’s lore and lore is important — I get that.

But Mania the character has no beef with most of the Alliance (except humans — she hates humans) and Mania the player could often use their help. And not being able to talk to them makes that a bit of a pain.