The Lords of Nordrassil

A couple of months have passed and with the Winter’s Veil incoming this seems like a good time to stop and take a look at how the achievements have been progressing.

No changes at the top of the table, but some movement in the mid ranks.

The achievements were taken on Sunday afternoon and there’s some interesting latest entries there. Quite a few from the newly release Icecrown instances and from the recent Pilgrim festival. A few people are clearing out ‘classic’ instances, while others seem to have spotted a festival I missed and got a Children’s week prize.

A final honourable mention goes to Besti for two reasons – firstly he’s the only non-level 80 in the list, beating quite a few of his top level rivals – and secondly as it looks like he snagged a trip to Blizzcon 2009, or at the very least managed to beg, borrow, buy or steal ‘Grunty’ the Murloc pet from someone who did!

As chasing achievements is key part of the WoW experience these days, I thought it might be fun to have a look at the guild stats on the armory to see who our top 20 achievers are.

The results are below – I’ve also included the latest achievement to see what we’re all working on – hover over the latest achievement to see the details.

There’s lots of brewfest, as expected, but a fair mix of other things too, across PVP. instances, exploring, questing, collecting etc – including some pretty cool achievements. Also no-one in the list has the same latest achievement, which works out a lot more interesting than if we had 20 Brewmasters

I might revisit this list in a few months to see how the standings have changed…

MMOvie – a great idea showcased with a short trailer last year. Just spotted on Dwarf Priest’s blog that a 10 minute version has now been put together by VOIG. Check out both the trailer and the 10 min version – WoW spoofs the movies in top machinima fashion – check out how many major film references you can catch   I love the fight club moment from the trailer!

Quick non-Wow item, but just wanted to share this story from BRK about an Operational Readiness Inspection as it entertained me. I’ve included an excerpt below.

An ORI? The Air Force has this little thing called an Operational Readiness Inspection where it tests a military base’s capability to respond in time of a war or other surprise. What happens is a plane lands and a high-ranking military official respectfully requests the base commander’s presence. They meet and the base commander is handed a folder that says,

Congratulations, your base is at war. Be prepared to deploy to Location X in 48 hours. Good Luck, your chance at a promotion to Major-General is in the balance. Love, The Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

The base commander has a heart-attack, the vice-commander slaps him back to consciousness, and the base goes into ORI-Mode. Pack this, move them over there, get the airplanes airborne, load all your equipment on the C-5, don’t sleep for 36 hours, then get your duffel bags filled with 2.8 pairs of underwear over to the processing facility to get shipped out. All of this under the watchful eyes of the ORI Inspection Team.

Read the full story at BRK’sOperational Readiness Inspection

There’s some great WoW Machinima out there at the moment and some of the very best is coming from Baron Soosdon. ‘I’m So Sick’ puts a lot of real MTV videos to shame and can be seen at Stage6 and at lower resolution at YouTube.

For a slightly more surreal experience, Snoman’s Ephemeral Dreamscape and its prequel Wandering Dreamscape make changes to the wow models, bringing you views of Azeroth as you’ve never seen it before. Highlights from Ephemeral include Flooded Un-Goro and Frozen Core. Youtube has a low-res version of Ephemeral and low-res Wandering split into 3 parts: part1, part2, part 3, but the high-res versions are recommended for best effect