After being dropped from Paypal we have rewritten our donation service to offer Google Wallet to service donations. Unlike Paypal, you no longer have to wait on emails for your codes! You'll immediately be redirected to a new tab in your account page that will contain your transaction history from Google Wallet.
From there, you'll be able to see your codes (and not lose them!) as well as see as what character used the code! This way, you can still donate for your friends!
Congrats to those who have placed in Season 18! The finalists in 2v2 are listed below.
We apologize for the extremely long season. This was unintended as we originally planned to end the season in August. There isn't much excuse for why the season was dragged on for so long. We apologize to all our arena players, and in the future we are going to keep seasons no longer than 3 months long, and announce end dates. We hope this will help improve more timely functioning arena seasons here.
1st Place: pinto da hunt 2nd Place: Cant Touch This 3rd Place: Och vi e tillbaka 4th Place: deasd 5th Place: Pve Hero 6th Place: NO WOMAN NO CRY (tied) 6th Place: Whatevsbro (tied)
Many players from 2011 and below that were inactive for long periods of time had their accounts removed from the server due to inactivity. This was during a time when we did not preserve donor accounts on the server when we performed inactive cleanups. Many players still contact us from this time period asking for restoration of their account, or at least their donations. While restoring the characters is now impossible, we've decided to begin restoring donor codes to players who can provide the email address of when they donated, and their old account name(s), and character name(s).
It's that time of year again, the mall has filled full of jack-o-lanterns, bats, ghosts, wicker-men, apple-bobbing and other seasonal decorations! More importantly, the Headless Horseman has once again returned this year to challenge players who dare disturb his grave!
Fun loot, broom mounts and a rare chance to drop the Horseman's Reins are available again this year!
Normal has released his fourth video compilation! While he apologizes the video is shorter than his previous ones, university and other real-life related factors have hindered his ability to add to it further. With fan requests for a new video, and only a limited number of clips, here is Normal 4:
Lately we've been hard at work on new features for the server. Last month we rolled out pathfinding (movement maps) in arena so that pets and charge-spells will now find their way to the player correctly instead of running through walls, air, etc. We plan on implementing this in battlegrounds soon!
Arena spectating is now live! You can now watch live rated matches as they happen in real-time. To make your spectating experience even better, download the spectator addon for tournament-like bars and the ability to change your point of view (PoV) to a player fighting. Jump to cancel and return to your character.
Dueling will now cause all players around you to disappear from view. This will help increase fps, consecration while dueling in dueling zones where many players may be dueling all on top of each other.
Hunters no longer have to tame pets. You may speak with the trainer in the mall and choose from 15 different pets to be instantly tamed.
We've rolled out a battleground balancing system that is now live. To fix the imbalance of faction queuing during certain hours, battlegrounds will now keep battlegrounds at an equal level of players, eg: 12v12, 9v9 until more people from both factions queue, then the number will go up, and keep at an equal number of players.
This should put a stop to the frustrating battlegrounds when one faction is currently queuing more than the other.
For the past month and a half we've been hard at work developing our very own custom armory integration with 3D models, arena team pages, arena ranking page, honor listing, etc. as well as spicing up lots of aspects of the site that we deemed need improving, and lastly -- making major changes to the framework that powers the website. Almost the entire framework has been rewritten and improved since the initial release back in July!
A huge shout out to our brilliant web developers, Adam (Subwai) and Filip! These two developers have crafted such a wonderful website for Smolderforge and we've very honored to have them with us. Thanks you two!
PS: You may need to F5 or Shift+R to force-reload the website's Cache to see all the appropriate changes -- so do that! Hope you enjoy the changes!
Congrats to those who have placed in Season 17! The finalists in 2v2 are listed as follows:
1st Place: whatsup homie 2nd Place: AintGatNoMoney 3rd Place: rngcarries both of us 4th Place: going top jk 5th Place: whuupwhuup 6th Place: a yo (tied) 6th Place: hello (tied)
Per popular request, we have developed a neutral dueling location on the server. Come duel against members of the opposing faction in the new area of Quel'Thalas!
We're experiencing problems with our host currently and have taken the server offline in the mean time to prevent player annoyance. We will be updating and bringing the server back online once we have updates and the issue is fixed.
UPDATE: Problems appear to be resolved. We will have the server back online shortly.
UPDATE 2: We're back online!
5 years ago, I was a 14-year old boy who had a dream of running a server that people could play on and enjoy. I wanted to be able to share things with players that I had made, and see them enjoy it. When I embarked on that journey, I never had the foresight to see my life for the next 5 years. I would have never known how many amazing connections, friends, and moments I have lived, experienced and shared over these years. I have made many contacts, traveled and met some of you, and continue to share a friendship with many of you.
Thank you. The past 5 years have been long, interesting, stressful, and amazing. I never thought I would find myself in a role creating what I have today. Smolderforge is something I am so proud of, and cherish very dearly. My friends, family, and acquaintances who are aware of what I do are fascinated and amazed -- as am I still. Somedays I will be making breakfast, stop, and suddenly think to myself, "Wait... I run a WoW server that thousands of people play on weekly... for over a quarter of my life." --- it's a lot to realize, and a lot of time to believe has passed.
I don't believe when I started I expected to continue to be running Smolderforge today; yet, here we are celebrating a milestone anniversary. FIVE YEARS. Thank you to everyone who has been with us all these years, new, old: you're all a part of this celebration. You have changed my life forever. Your interest in Smolderforge helped shape my future, given me an interest to pursue a software development career, interesting university application essays, stories, and much more. The amount of things I have learned is enormous; Smolderforge was educating to me, and I have obtained so many useful skills and knowledge from trial and error learning throughout all these years.
Thank you for the opportunity to share something special with you. Happy 5 years, everyone.
Throughout the (almost) 5 years of us being a live server, we have had hundreds of thousands come and go over time. Resulting in, nearing 1.5 million character creations in that time. Because this amount of data is enormous, and has a negative impact on server performance, we have always performed "prunes" where we delete accounts and its characters that have been inactive from our servers for 10 months. This helps clean out banned accounts that were denied appeals, as well as old players never returning.
However, we would receive emails occasionally stating they were returning to Smolderforge from a long leave and inquiring as to where their account had gone. Disheartened to find out their characters were forever lost, and their donations unable to be retrieved.
Because of this, we have implemented a donor preservation system. Any new Season 4 package donor since January 15th is now automatically flagged for preservation via their account. Older donors (the majority) will need to manually flag their accounts via in-game NPC. If you are a Season 4 donor, please take a visit to the donor mall and speak to the Preservation Crystal. Opt-in to preserve your account, and you are good to go! Your information will be protected from prunes.
We hope this will reduce the amount of upset players who have returned after such long leaves. We do our best to make our players happy, and knowing we can keep their characters waiting for them when they return is another happiness we hope to keep.
Season 16 has come to a close. All titles and mount rewards have been appropriately distributed to their respective finalists. A few teams were disqualified for win-trading. In future seasons, we will now have anti-wintrading measures in place to help thwart the amount of problematic disruption to the arena.
Season 17 has now started! Good luck to all challengers who participate!
