Category: Uncategorised

This topic has been floating around in my idea pit for a while, from when the new pets and the sparkle pony popped up on the wow store.  I admit to buying both the original pets and the pony for SWMBO.  So, my flag is firmly planted in the “I don’t see these as a problem” camp.  So let’s have a look at some of the arguments against these items.

• They take development effort away from the game as a whole
  Unlikely in my view, given that we have now had several rounds of these items appearing I think it’s safe to say that there is a dedicated sub-team which is tasked with generating virtual items for sale on the Blizz site.  So we have a couple of coders, some artists and sound engineers creating the content.  Some test time, probably rolled up on their normal process.  Self funding and feeding, unless I’m getting my mental estimates very very wrong, cash into the business as a whole some of which will be pure profit and some will be going to support the ongoing development of the game.Removing the sale of the items from the plan would not necessarily mean the staff are kept on wow, remain employed by Blizz or indeed have any impact on the game.
• Blizzard said they would never sell items
  They also said that race change, faction change, changing the look of your toon would also never happen.  They’re a company, in this business to make money by keeping their player base happy.They also have sold items via the gaming cards for some time now, they’re not as obvious because they’re only a chance to get the mount / pet / item but it’s the same principle.
• It’s pets now, it’ll be armour next
  I don’t think so, everything which has been done to date has no practical effect in game.  Unless you count the approx 250g saved in game for each toon leveled from 1 – 80 on purchasing mounts.  Moving to a model where game affecting items are available for money would be a major shift from them, I’m not saying they’re going to do this, I am saying I think it’s unlikely.  However if you had asked me last month if they were aiming to make my name public I would have said “not a chance, they’re not that stupid”.
• They’re going to start selling gold
  Again I doubt it, there is a big enough problem with inflation within the game already, to the point where it can be seen that they’re deliberately breaking certain markets up because the prices those materials can hold are significantly above the norm.  Letting players buy gold would reduce the amount people are playing, it would remove the desire to keep renewing while grinding gold to get the current must have mount.

So on balance I do not think that the RMT that Blizz has brought into the game so far is a killer, everything is optional, even the slight gold saving on the mount over time is nothing compared with the gold a level 80 can grind in an hour on dailies.  As always I’m watching with interest to see where this is going, Blizz have seen a massive level of interest in these items which has probably surpassed their expectations (estimations have put the gross from the steed at millions of dollars).

They’re going to want more of this, but will they get greedy?

Sapphiron : Mages, please do not iceblock when the dragon goes up, as confusion can occur when everyone goes to hide behind iceblocks, and then die because you decided to add an extra one into the mix.  Use your legs like everyone else.

Sartharion : Ubergeared warrior dps, if you’re going to wallop the boss so hard during a 3D zerg attempt please be standing on the other side of the boss to everyone else, so when the big ugly dragon turns to you and burps we don’t end up with the entire raid being cooked.

The summer is getting to the guild quite significantly, there’s a general air of “Meh”, we have lack of numbers even for the Wednesday raid (Team Tank filled the dps gaps again), and one of the core dps has announced an intention to leave the game / greatly reduce this play time (external to wow reasons).

This week’s raiding has been juggled so we get to see Arthas again given that we’ve only killed him twice as a group, I’ve not been in on either which combined with keeping the 10-man lock for Team Pirate means no achivement OCD satisfaction for me or title.  Hopefully this gets resolved tonight and we go for another dragon kill down at the Sanctum, possible some heroic training.

So, with Cataclysm coming where does this leave things?

It’s clear from the realm itself that things are very very quiet.

EO is having problems getting enough players online, even for the reduced summer schedule (Saturday is on hiatus for the moment), typically from the dps team which tends to mean we have a player or two from team tank filling in the gaps (just as well I didn’t keep the healing off spec).

Very few pugs for the weekly raid, whereas a couple of months ago /trade was spammed with them all week, the heroic queues for healers are up (4 minutes or so), though slightly perversely the queue times for dps are actually down, but I guess that’s also a sign of the number of players who are just not in the system at the moment.  I’m seeing a lot of activity down in the levelling zones, so a stack of players are off getting an alt or two levelled up and shedloads more RP (I play on an RP PvE realm).

What’s coming which will bring the players back?

• Dragon lead destruction and the lead up event (that’s a no brainer)
• Reclaiming Gnomer and the Troll homeland (I’ll be playing on my horde alt for that as well)
• Cataclysm itself
• Nothing else I can think of

So enjoy the quiet while it lasts.

Westboro Baptist Church has decided to add to it’s list of hate targets, the LGBT community is no longer alone it is joined by the Geeks as they’ve decided to picket Comic-Con, that well known pool of human depravity.  So here’s the thing, these comic geeks, they’re not raising Batman up as an Idol, or worshipping him, some of them will be regular church/mosque/temple/stone ring in the forest goers, no not all of them worship your version of reglion.

Get over it.

They’re not asking you to start worshiping Hobbits, or fear the second coming of Felix the Cat, they’re wanting to get together, have a good few days meeting up with old friends, new friends, random people they meet in the bar and generally doing the things done at large fan conventions.

So, again, get over it, get over yourselves and go check your own behaviour.

[Edit: while I’m at it…]

The nutters are out in force at the moment, Ursula Vernon (got some of her stuff on the wall at home) has been identified by this bunch of loonies (http://www.watchmanscry.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11338)

The concensus within WoW is that there is a tank shortage, the designers built wrath around a tank shortage (enter the DK), there is also a shortage of healers, not as huge but it’s there.

I disagree, there is no shortage of players who play healing and tanking toons, who spend a lot of time on them.

Let us look at two guilds, firstly Team Pirate.  This is a small guild of 10 active players, we manage to get into some 10-man content.  Currently the guild has access to three tanks who are geared enough for ICC10 (a total of 6 players with tanking alts capable of at least all the Wrath 5-man heroic content) and five ICC10 geared healers (I think seven players with healing alts capable of Wrath 5-man heroic content).  We are at the point where there’s rotation going on to bring in the alts on ICC10 runs just for fun and frolics.

Secondly there’s the 25-man raiding guild.  I’m not sure about alts but we’re running with a 6-man tanking team and a 8-man healing team.  Team tank has an almost 100% attendance record.  We’re there, we’re tanking boss and we’re sitting standby / filling in as dps where needed.

What is the problem?

PUGs, it’s as simple as that.

Pugging is brutal on tanks, there are some runs which are a breeze, but then there are the others, the horrible runs.  The runs where the DPS are yelling “gogogogooo” the instant the tank zones in, the runs where the dps are already pulling or ripping aggro with suicide storm (or other aoe of choice) on trash packs, “helping” the tank by pulling the next trash ready for the tank to speed things up.

All the while complaining, about the speed, about why the tank isn’t keeping aggro.

These aren’t the bottom of the pile but personally I’ve not encountered “puggus insultinus” in any of my runs yet but the likes of dear_gnome are full of stories of complete fail where the only responses are insulting at best and worryingly abusive at worst.

So, everyone in dpsland, we understand your queue times are horrible (I’ve sat there as well on my caster alts) but if you want more tanks to queue make it less of a pain for them to do so.

A bit of balance

To all elitist “you need me more than I need you” tanks, please go die in a fire, a big one.  You are entitlement morons of the first order.  Just because we’re a role which is in demand doesn’t make us “better” than the other players.  Stop giving us a bad name.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NdSBnLj_pw]

[Edit: 20/Sept/2010 These images are outdated, there are more recent posts on this blog as well as elsewhere which cover the new models which dropped over the weekend.]

As always, things may / will change.

Or, “you pulled it, you tank the damm thing!”

Following on from the discussion from Blog Azeroth on healers letting people die to their own stupid it struck me that the same question applies equally to the tank.

So, should I as a tank in a 5-man heroic (or indeed any other 5-man content) let the dps eat some floor because they keep pulling aggro of me.  It’s tempting I have to admit, particularly when it’s happening throughout the entire run, there are things all DPS can do to control their aggro (or not), I’m aware of just how much some classes are aggro magnets.

Just as I spend the first couple of pulls in a run working out how much damage the DPS are throwing, how the healer is doing on their mana / keeping everyone topped up so the dps should also be looking at how the tank is pulling, how much threat they’re able to dump onto the mobs before ripping into them with as much AoE as they can for the pretty pretty numbers.  So any DPS which keep ripping aggro know what they’re doing and knows the risks.  When tanking I will be doing my best to keep control of the mobs but I’m sorry to say there are things known as cooldowns and the GCD.  I may not have a taunt / AoE taunt spare to use, particularly if aggro is being ripped a lot.

Will I leave a mob on a player, no, it goes against everything I’ve been doing for the last two years as a tank.  If something isn’t hitting me I consider that to be a fault which must be corrected, I will be trying to recollect that mob as soon as I can, but if you’re a cloth wearer who keeps taking my toys then at some point I will not be able to get it back before it starts nomming on your face, you had better hope the healer is wanting to heal…

Another day, another update on Real ID (Updated Blue on Real ID), Let’s look at some of the interesting points.

Addons

A bit of a dodge here by Blizz, apparently as long as you don’t install an addon designed to collect the data there’s no risk.  However how many of us spend the time to download addons and check them line by line looking for attempts to access Real ID information.  Sloppy implementation by Blizzard, I’m surprised that they’re still dodging this, though it is stated that there are attempts ongoing to change the behaviour.

GameBook

The end-game is announced, they want to be a social networking / gaming company.

Other stuff

There is another blue floating around where Blizz have stated that they are working on changes to make the friend of a friend sharing optional / configurable.  Once that is in I might be more interested in it as a feature, though I still personally want the ability to have “stealth” alts / games, there are times when I what I want to do is slack on another alt and just kill things.

Pretty much everything in the original classic Azeroth is changing, the world is being ripped apart and rebuilt.  A massive undertaking, we’re getting new quest lines, the rewards are being re-worked, this is earth shattering.  What about all the old content, where is it going?  Away is the simple answer, more likely stored in the code repositories at Blizz Central, never to be seen again except in screen shots.

There is already wailing and gnashing of teeth over this, however it misses a major point of WoW, it’s about change.  When we buy Warcraft 1/2/3, Starcraft, Sims, Civilisation etc etc then we’re getting a fixed world, some expansions might tweak it but those changes are rarely game changing, they save those for the major game versions.

WoW evolves in a way those games don’t but it follows the same model.  We get the incremental changes during the expansions, where the new raid instances and dungeons are dropped, we get the game changing events at the expansions packs.  The big difference is we can never go back, we can’t delete the game and just install up to expansion three, we have to live with the world as Blizz have defined it right now, it’s a living world.

Enjoy the changes.