09/01/2016

Kronos Perks

I've written about how I ended up playing on Kronos - there was definitely some thought put into it. Still, I have to admit that at the time I certainly didn't know just how big the rivalry between Nostalrius and Kronos would end up being, nor that Kronos is very much the underdog in this battle. (Check any YouTube video in which someone complains about how WoW used to be so much better back in the day and you'll find people in the comments shouting: "Come play on Nostalrius!" Kronos is comparatively unknown.)

Would I reroll to be part of a bigger population? Are you kidding? I'm up to more than five days of /played time on my paladin after several months of real time and I'm still only in the low forties... hell no.

Still, I also realised that there are perks to playing on Kronos that I initially wasn't aware of. This post by a guild leader who consciously decided to move his Vanilla WoW guild from Emerald Dream to Kronos instead of Nostalrius lists a lot of them. To be honest it's so long that I skimmed most of it, but I particularly liked his chapter five about the world, taking note of things like different coloured rabbits, dynamic line of sight and smarter mob AI.

That post also served to make me aware that the TwinStar website (home of all things Kronos) actually offers a huge amount of features I didn't know about. For example it has an actual Armory, which is admittedly not very Vanilla-like (I believe the WoW Armoury was introduced in Wrath of the Lich King?), but since it doesn't affect my in-game experience I consider it a very cool tool to have outside the game. So if you want to check on my pally's progress for example, you can find her profile here.

There's also the "TwinHead" section, which is sort of like Wowhead, only filled with Vanilla information about this particular server. Admittedly the lack of comments limits its usefulness somewhat (if I'm stuck on a quest, I'm usually still better off using Google to find some old Wowhead comments about it), but it's great for things like finding accurate NPC locations in the old world, finding out which mobs actually drop your quest items, or even finding out if there is a bug, as their bug reporting feature is directly integrated into the same system. For example I mentioned in my last post that the Gizelton Caravan quest in Desolace isn't working - so when you go to TwinHead's page about this quest (linked), it actually states outright that this quest's status is "not working" and via a link on the "issues" tab you can find a detailed description of what the problem is.

Not officially linked to the TwinStars website, but no less interesting is Kronos Census, which lists detailed stats about player activity as well as class, faction and level distribution among the characters on the server.

I'm just impressed by the infrastructure behind it all. We've certainly come a long way from private servers being dodgy little things that few people knew about.

4 comments:

  1. The armory started in June 2007 on its then new URL (wowarmory.com). That's patch 2.1, early TBC!

    http://web.archive.org/web/20070903153818/http://www.wowarmory.com/updates.xml

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    1. I stand corrected then! For some reason I have no real memories of the armoury back then though. I just know that it became really popular in Wrath with the introduction of things like achievements and gearscore.

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  2. Hello Shintar, I just came across your blog a few days ago been reading through your vanilla wow journey. Its been a great throw back to when I was in highschool. I just started on the server.

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    1. Welcome to Kronos! :) Hope you enjoy the experience.

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