Farewell to TourGuide

Unfortunately having just posted an update about the Lunar Festival and recommended the Tour Guide plug-in, various rumours were flying about the sudden withdrawal of the TourGuide mod from curse and wowinterface. What had happened, where had it gone, would it be coming back again? Nothing was posted on the author's web site and it had also disappeared off the listing there.

Luckily WoW Pro has the details - TourGuide has been bought by a levelling guide maker and so won't be available for free any more. The author's web site now has a couple of posts here and here explaining what has happened. For now, only purchasers of the levelling guide will get access to TourGuide, although anyone with it already installed can continue to use it.

It's hard for me to get worked up about this though - the mod was free software and thus the author can do what he wants with it. If he wants to take an opportunity to make some money from his hard work, good luck to him. We didn't have any guarantee he would continue to maintain it, or just dump it like so many other mods, or withdraw it. In that way, its quite nice the author has made sure those of us still using TourGuide can continue to do so. Also there is no monopoly on TourGuide-like mods or anything preventing anyone from coding a different one (apart from a lot of hard work of course).

WoW Pro did have a levelling mod before they switched to TourGuide and it seems they are planning on developing a new mod, or resurrecting their old one. Good luck to them. Given that new mods spring up to fill gaps in the WoW community, I hope authors have an incentive to develop their own TourGuide-like mod, now that the defacto one is no longer around.

For now, anyone with TourGuide installed can continue to use it, although I don't think anyone will be publishing guides for it any more (free or otherwise), so it's use will become limited once Cataclysm hits. I will probably leave my Hallow's End guide up, but there is little incentive to develop it further. Farewell TourGuide!

Lunar Festival Is In The Air

Although the Love thing is still going, this week I shall be mostly grinding the Lunar Festival, which is now on at the same time! Crazy Lunar calendars...

I already posted a guide to the Lunar Festival and luckily it has not changed. The one addition I'm making this year is to slavishly follow the Lunar Festival Tour Guide mod.

I managed to grind out the Love stuff last week, leaving me clear to visit a billion Elders for the next 3 weeks on me Druid, and maybe collect some Triumph along the way in those Heroics.

Love Is In The Air

The Love Is In The Air festival started last Sunday, and as a nod to the over-commercialized nature of these things, this year the Crown Chemical Co have taken over the festival in Azeroth.

It's all different but strangely familiar
The festival has also utterly changed from last year, before you had to get gift boxes from guards and NPCs and get random drops in them, now you do the dailies on offer and get Love Tokens which act as currency for the items you actually need to complete the various achievements. You can even buy the very rare Peddlefeet pet with tokens, thus making it very not-rare any more.

New bossen
But, there is more! This year as well as ensuring Arugal Must Die (again), you can visit Shadowfang Keep for a crack at the new seasonal boss. This is a somewhat underwhelming opportunity, as to actually kill said boss you're probably best being in Tier 9, but they drop the magnificent loot of Tier 8 level necklaces. Great! I got a necklace for off-spec. However, there is always a silver lining to any cloud, and this is in the shape of some very suggestive sounding loot and a unique mount and pet. Unfortunately the drop rates for the mount and pet are very bad and only the seriously committed would farm for them, I certainly won't be bothering. Good luck if you do.

Anything for completer-finishers?
So what if you did all the achievements last year? Kam did, and the only new achievement now available is Tough Love which requires you to kill the new boss. Luckily I have a Druid alt I'll be doing the lot on again.

Alting it up
A few things are evident which make alting the festival quite nice. Firstly the bad drop rates are a thing of the past, merely killing mobs with the Kit in your inventory is sufficient. Running a few heroics seems to be the way to go, since Blizzard fixed the cunning vehicle missions not to give Charms any more.

Secondly, the candies, chocolates, and Charm Bracelets are not soul bound. Therefore you can go and gather Charm Bracelets on your main, then trade them across to your alt using a trusted third party. Unfortunately you can't post conjured items.

Any spare chocolates or candies can also be traded, or put into a guild bank for your alts to use.

Guides
Rather than write a guide, I shall just link to a few I found:
ShamWoW
WoW.com
Fluid Druid