Why Transfer?

After closed beta, when WoW launched ‘for real’, I found myself on a server named Daggerspine. One of the original WoW servers, it was all I ever knew, or cared to know, for quite a long time. It was PvP, it was well populated, and it was home. New servers came, and old servers merged (some even merging into Daggerspine, hi Blackrock), but as far as I was concerned, Daggerspine was WoW. There were other versions of WoW floating around in parallel dimensions, but it didn’t affect me, so whatever.

Then one day, along came paid transfers. Before, Blizzard had needed to decide that the realm sucked enough to force everyone off it, or at least give you the option for you to move yourself, should you be so inclined. Suddenly, the guild I was in (“Lotus Prophecy” or something equally ridiculous), decided that Laggerspine (omglol) was suddenly unbearable, and the officers had decided that we should begin to research a few other new realms to escape the constant disconnects we were suffering in MC. To be fair, Daggerspine was pretty bad at the time. Being an original server, it was loaded to capacity, and the instance servers seemed to suffer. Are instance servers even separated from the realms? I don’t think so, but our mind was made up!

I went to work one day, and came home in the evening to find the guild message of the day stating that Scilla was to be our new home, and to hurry up and transfer over there because that’s where all the fun new content was going to be! Our “research” of these other realms probably went something like this:

Click create new character, horde.

Hmm, Scilla’s name is green and has “recommended” by it.

Holy crap! They have an auction house, too? Woohoo! Notify the troops!

About $100 later, the logistics of moving over bank alts and crap aside, we set up shop on Scilla. There we were, and there we raided, until about 3 weeks later when the guild fell apart. The core group of raiders (myself included) stayed together through about 3 re-iterations of Lotus Prophecy. Fall of Man, Omen of the Phoenix... I was never there when the new charters were bought.

Paid transfers had a 6 month cooldown, and people bitched loudly about ‘being stuck on Scilla’, blaming our old guild master for having the stupid idea to leave in the first place. Fast forward six months, and many people who made the switch ended up going back on the day their transfers came back up. Scilla was too much to be made to suffer, and they missed Daggerspine. They also had only one or two toons each, and 25 or 50 dollars was worth it to go back home. I, on the other hand, wasn’t about to throw another 100 dollars at moving my toons back again, and stayed behind with a few others in the same boat who had alts.

People began to drift apart. Back then, without forty people, there wasn’t much to do. I finally went back to Daggerspine on my tank and was welcomed straight into another raiding guild led by a friend of mine, which convinced me to bring the whole caravan along.

This is all not very interesting, except that FINALLY, in the end, this same group of people finally ended up deciding that Scilla was the best after all, and went back, again, to Scilla. It was ridiculous.

I can’t remember what server I was on when I moved to Japan, but for a while I tried to make the time difference work, raiding on Saturday and Sunday mornings (Friday and Saturday nights for America). After raids were called, everyone would collapse from staying up so late, and I’d be sitting at my desk around noon, looking for groups. I eventually bit the bullet and went to an Oceanic server to play in my own time zone, striking off into the wilderness on my own; no friends, no guild, no vent. My gear was good enough to land me a spot in a TK / SSC guild, which was new content for me. My other guilds had dragged our feet Pre-BC, getting up to Sartura in AQ40 before BC launched, but not much further. We were then delegated to Kara status when our guild couldn’t pull 25 people together consistently in the expansion. Being in a TK guild was new and exciting for a while, never mind that everyone was from Singapore, and I was one of the three or four native English speakers in the guild.

That guild lasted for a while, with me struggling to understand the boss fights in broken english, until I gquit and drifted around a bit. I eventually wound up in a guild named fèár, and holy christ I need to write a whole rant on stupid extended characters in guild names, and how annoying it is trying to use them in the /who window. It was with this guild that I finally got into a groove on Thaurissan (my oceanic server), and we progressed as a guild to kill Kael and Vashj, stepping into Hyjal and Black Temple as a solid unit. I was raiding on my rogue primarily, which unto itself was a pretty impressive feat, since once a guild finds out I have prot and resto alts, the DPS I might offer a raid becomes trivial. I like to think of myself as a “gud rouge”, so maybe my numbers spoke for themselves? Who cares, I was having fun.

Why, then, did I just jump ship last week when free transfers from my server to another newly formed one came up? I talked about it with the guild, discussing the imbalance of horde to alliance on our server (we outnumbered alliance about 5 to 1), the opportunity to be an early ‘prominent guild’ on the new server, or just a general escape from the bogged down mess that Thaurissan had become (it really was bad). Everyone pretty much decided that they weren’t leaving, so one day at work I just up and moved all my toons over.

There were a few issues I had with the fact that we were destroying perfectly good gear by sharding it when no one wanted to spend large amounts of DKP for sidegrades, or situationally useful gear. Rather than just give the gear to raiders, ‘the rule’ was that it would be sharded, nevermind that it might be useful in certain encounters, but not worth going into negative DKP for. I offered on one occasion to trade shards in my bank for the item, since that’s all they were going to end up with anyway, but there was no wiggle room, apparently. Seeing Hyjal and BT gear become a stack of void crystals (which are readily available in Kara) seemed a bit silly, so I made up my mind to move on.

I’m not one for drawn out crap in guild chat, and just transferring off the server avoided having to log in every toon and gquit. All the top guilds had left for the new server already as well, so Thaurissan was drying up.

And now here I am on Dreadmaul. The entire realm is composed of people moving from their old servers (four oceanic servers were offered free moves to the new realm), so I know a few people that came from Thaurissan as well, but they’re already in their guilds that came over with them, and nobody needs a rogue. Even if I wanted to go back, I’d be looking at over $100 in fees to get right back where I was. The new server seems cool, I guess? People are trying extra hard to claim the title of ‘that one retard in the trade channel’, or ‘that one troll on the realm forums’ so that’s wearing thin, but that’s to be expected. I’m happily ganking alliance anywhere I find them, to crush their hopes that this server will be different, but in the back of my mind, I’m wondering why I abandoned a perfectly good guild of cool people that was actually making progress with me as an integral part of the team. Do I just hate being happy? If I find enjoyment in the game, do I feel the need to throw it all away and start again from fresh to ‘get it right’?

Looking back at my account page on worldofwarcraft.com I’ve spent $325 on paid character transfers alone. That’s enough to pay for 21 months of the game’s subscription. Many of these moves were to get my character right back to where I was in the first place. There’s no clean ending to this story, and maybe that’s the point. What I want is finality, an ending to the shuffling and reshuffling. I want to find a guild that I can progress with, contribute to, and that will be open to suggestions from core raiders on stuff like the issue with sharding gear I mentioned above. That guild is out there, but they went back to Scilla when I went to Japan. Everything we do right now is pointless anyway, with Wrath looming over the not too distant horizon, so maybe it’s all for the best?

[continue...]

IAMABOT

Hi there. I am a bot. Last night, as I slept in my bed, an alt of mine was busily queuing up and running Alterac Valley over and over. At first, I wasn’t sure how I felt about this, but the more it goes on, the more I realize I’m pretty much okay with it. Since the merger of RedGuides and NotAddicted, I’ve been exposed to a somewhat darker underside of the game that I wasn’t really aware of before. I knew things like exploits and bots existed, but never really paid them much attention.

There were “casual exploits” that I would engage in. Things that were obvious loopholes in the game, but didn’t really feel like exploits, the same way downloading ripped music doesn’t really feel the same as walking into a store in the mall and stuffing a CD down your pants. It doesn’t feel like much of anything, actually. It feels kinda like how breathing does at this point; you just do it.

An example of this would be how you used to be able to pull The Black Stalker without all the drama involved in running the entire Underbog. After zoning in, you could kill one mob, then have a warlock /target The Black Stalker. He patted around a bit up in his room, but if you timed it right, you could catch him on the 'near side' of his pat, have the warlock send his imp to attack, and the imp would bug out and pop thru the wall into the bosses chamber. Warriors would pop commanding shout, and healers would be spamming rank one heals on the warlock. The lock would be pulled into combat thru his imp, and everyone else pulled into combat by assisting the lock (thru heals or buffs) would be ported up to the boss, where they could run out of his room, reset the encounter, and proceed to summon the remaining party members up to where they were. Bing Bang Boom, kill the last boss of the instance for (basically) free loots, and a chance to roll on a Primal Nether.

Heroics can only be run once per day, but this was something I pretty much did every day until it was (ridiculously slowly) patched out. One of my alts was an enchanter (needing the primal), and another could use the DPS ring that he dropped. It was never hard to find people to engage in this “exploit”, and we didn’t even really hide the fact that we were doing it. We’d openly advertise “LF1M Warlock Heroic UB Bug, kill 1 pat and then warp to last boss” in trade, and get lots of responses. It got to the point that anyone in the LFG tool for Heroic UB was doing it. If you needed loot off the first boss, good luck with that, because nobody actually ran the instance the intended way anymore.

Botting in AV is a whole other can of worms, or is it? Is it really any different than reading a webpage on the other monitor while reaching over to jump once every three minutes while running in a random direction in Alterac Valley? I mean, yeah, I guess so... but the principle is the same. I’m basically not “there”, or really participating in the game either way. Having it remain plugging away while I sleep is different, but it’s not like I sit there and watch the progress bar in uTorrent as I download episodes of Lost each week. I set it up, go to bed, and reap the benefits the following morning.

Why bother at all? Because I’m getting tired of raiding, and there’s a big cockblock bouncer standing behind the arena NPC named Three Hundred Plus Resilience holding the 'invite list' in his hands. Joining a 1500 rating arena team used to mean you’d be fighting equally geared scrubs, but that doesn’t really work anymore. People in full Season 3 gear are now running their trash buddies up to 1850, and pretty much crapping on everyone along the way. To last even 20 seconds in arena as a healer with low resilience requires me burning all my cooldowns on myself, god forbid I want to help a teammate. I can’t even get into premade BG pugs without armory checks beforehand. It’s silly.

To think that all my hard earned PVE gear is pretty much useless inside of the arena is laughable. I mean, I know WHY they do it (resilience nullifies streaky crit chains), but it doesn’t make me feel any better to know I’ll need to run AV over and over and over again to even get entry level PVP gear, when I’ve already burned so many hours of my life sitting in raids. It’s cute that I can trade Tier 4 tokens for Season 2 gear now, but we don’t run Gruul so we can give loot tokens to people already wearing Tier 5. If we run it at all, it's to gear out new recruits in Tier 4 PVE gear, because other people have burned out and left for another guild or to start PVPing. It’s almost like they should just give you two pieces of gear each time you redeem a token. Just give you the PVE gear you’re after, and throw in the PVP gear as a bonus. If you earn 2000 arena points, and go buy Arena shoulders, they should just throw in the PVE shoulders too. Either way you’ve earned it. You did the time, downed the content (be it PVP or PVE), your tier level of gear should be raised across the board.

Look at the new tournament test realm. For 20 dollars, you can upgrade your account to allow entry to this exclusive realm where (surprise, surprise) all the gear, gems, and enchants you could ever possibly desire are yours for the taking. Free. Okay, well, 20 dollars, but you need to spend zero hours accumulating it. Never rolled a mage before? No sweat, just hit the character creation button. Bling! Level 70 mage in full epics. Yeah, that makes sense…

So I downloaded Glider.

I originally got it with the sole intent to level fishing, another complete and utterly ridiculous time sink. There is ZERO skill involved in fishing. It doesn’t even require walking to anywhere besides the pool of water in Ogrimmar. You can get skillups standing in Ogrimmar just as easily as you can anywhere in the Outlands. I wanted access to the fishing daily quests, but refused to sit at my monitor right-clicking the fucking bobber for 8 hours straight to “unlock” this exclusive content. I’ve got over 8 zillion hours of my life sunk into the game already. You’d think maxing the fishing skill would be like a quest. Not some punishing bullshit exercise in masochism. So I set up Glider to click the bobber for me, and woke up the next morning at 354 fishing. I slept for 6 or 7 hours, and it didn’t even reach the max rank. This wasn't even starting from scratch, this was like "the final push to 375" I was going for. Yeah, awesome.

Taking 'gliding' to the next level of auto queuing BGs seemed like it would be a pretty daunting task, but using the same fishing principles, it actually wasn’t that hard. I just downloaded a pack of AV profiles, and some Glider addon thing that auto queues ("Spartacus"). I don’t even know how they work, I just followed a set up guide, and huzzah, here I go. I basically walk up to the battle master, click GO, and it handles the rest. The cursor paws around on the screen looking for the battle master, finds it and queues up, enters the battle, and then executes a chain of auto-walks based on where in the instance you are. If I get attacked, my character just waits to die, rezzes, and picks up a path from there to … wherever. I really don’t even know. It kind of just marches to the Alliance base and then dies there over and over amid the chaos. When I watch it do its thing, it all looks pretty silly. If I bump into a wall, Glider tries to strafe around it. If that doesn’t work, it walks backward about five feet, rotates a bit (lol keyboard turner), then tries to walk forward again. Assuming it gets around the obstacle, it goes back along its merry way. Sometimes it just does this randomly without any obstacle in my path. I can watch the Log window, it's got funny little messages it spits out... "Oops! Looks like we're stuck, trying something fancy", etc...

The best part about this is that now that I know how it reacts, it’s fun to watch the screen and see other people bumping into things, strafing around, and walking backwards five feet. Half the people in the battleground are gliding as well, and the other half are the retards I really don't have any interest playing with anyway; the guys who shout orders in capslock like they’re Genghis Fucking Kahn, or read some quote on a CoD4 loading screen and suddenly think they're Sun Tzu.

Eventually I’ll have the honor needed to purchase enough resilience gear to actually stand a chance in the 1500s bracket of arena, and then I’ll need to actually play this toon again. That’s fine! That’s all I wanted in the first place! I have three 70s, and I raid on my two mains enough that it already makes my wife crazy. As it stands, I feel like I’m not logged in farming something, I’m not being productive. The whole "Evercrack" thing comes full circle, but that's the point. It's obviously in Blizzard's best interest to have you spend twice the amount of time logged in to be viable in two different aspects of the same game. The only serious asset the game revolves around is how much time you can afford to spend logged in. Gold farmers don't sell gold, this is nothing new. They sell TIME. With Glider, I can just set the bot up and actually sit down and enjoy dinner with my wife, or go watch a movie, content knowing that my toon is busily doing its own thing, hard at work for me. Isn’t that what computers were supposed to do in the first place? To take care of the menial tasks for humanity? Remove the drudgery from our lives, so we can bask in the finer parts of life?

I envision a perfect future where 40 Alliance and 40 Horde just auto-walk past each other in a battleground that never ends… no towers are captured, no generals defeated, our computers just bumping into walls over and over, backing up 5 feet, turning and pushing ever forward towards the ideal tomorrow where honor ticks away in an AV match that will never end...

[continue...]

PVE is Hard

So yeah. The entire game of WoW at this point has just deteriorated into an endless crybaby fingerpointing “NO U” fest, and it’s getting pretty hard to find excuses to log in for it anymore. One topic that never goes out of style is comparing Apples to Oranges, and the sitting back and watching people get worked up in the comments section.

I still read Ming’s blog from time to time for giggles in between my lessons, and marvel at the entire reader base’s complete disregard for … well, anything really. Then I remember that Ming’s blog sprang forth from the bowels of the Rogue Forums like Athena sprung forth from Zues’ brow, and everything suddenly makes sense again.

One of the latest posts at WoM details the adventures of 25 PvPers out to prove, once and for all, that PvP requires more skill than PvE. Their argument hinges on that fact that a guild formed a week ago basically blew through end-game content easily.

Awesome. Grats.

The part that everyone in the 13 pages of comments fails to realize, is that I could do the same with 25 random people selected off the street that were dedicated to achieving that goal. The point of this GAME is that you need to bring people together, and have them focused on the task at hand. Everything after that is trivial.

Have you ever inspected anyone during a raid and found that their spec is ‘pretty much fucking garbage for raiding’? Ever been in a raid where someone fell asleep in the middle of it? Hunter forgot to bring arrows? Shaman forgot to bring Ankhs? I don’t imagine anything like that happens during Nihilum raids. It all directly relates to the fact that Nihilum is focused on the raid content, and everyone in the raid WANTS TO BE THERE. Nobody has to log off after three attempts to do dishes. Nobody just had their bandwidth capped last night by Telstra. They are committed to the task at hand, and THAT is 90% of raiding. The other 10% boils down to just executing the task at hand, and not being a complete retard (don’t stand in flame strikes / void zones, stay out of cleaves, etc).

Bravo for finding 25 people committed to the singular task of proving that PvE is easy. Way to go. Now that you’ve done it, go ahead and try to KEEP GOING, clearing the same stupid fights week in and week out, to gear out the entire guild for the next challenge. Chances are you’ll find people falling asleep during runs, or having to walk the dog after the next wipe.

The same argument can be made for PvP, so here goes: finding 5 random people off the street, you could put together a winning PvP arena team. I hear underwear across the planet bunching up, but it’s TRUE. You aren’t the only one that knows when to cloak. People have this urge to defend whatever it is they do as being hard or difficult, when nine times out of ten, a monkey flailing around can do the same thing. Take five scrubs off the street, sit them down and teach them how their character works, and have them work together to learn the ins and outs of arena and a winning team can be made. They would need spend a while learning the game, a luxury our guild didn’t really need to deal with. I would have been more impressed, and the point would have been driven further home, if you had enlisted your grandparents to clear BT. All it would have proved is what I’ve already stated above, though.

Yes, this guild was full of people that were primarily PvPers, but you’re going to tell me they never ran an instance? They leveled their toons all the way to 70 PvPing? Is that even possible? I’m leaving out that this superhero team of PvP allstars apparently had a tier 6 equipped main tank leading them thru their runs, and used the same strats and bosskiller guides as every other PvE guild.

Everything in this game boils down to positioning, pushing buttons at the right time, and …. Uhhh… that’s pretty much it. There isn’t even a number three.

Raid boss fights / trash pulls. Stand here, hit kick when it heals / shield block when it shears / flamey flame royale when the debuff is active. Run over here at the designated time. Go.

Arena. Stand here, put your totems over there, kick or pummel during heals, run behind the pillar to LoS (line of sight) the other guy at the designated time.

PvE has an added element of threat. Going balls to the wall is frowned upon, for about the first 10 seconds of each threat wipe. Big deal. Both PvE and PvP rely on team members following the orders of the designated leader. Oh, wait… I’m, sorry… does arena not have raid leaders? That’s funny, I seem to remember Ming complaining loudly for his last 30 posts or whatever about how Serennia tells him exactly when to use his blind, thereby eliminating Ming’s Own Better Judgement from the equation. In PvE this goes without saying, as we all know about totalitarian raid leaders, be they Sebudai or that guy in the Onyxia DOTs Video.

PvP has the added element of other people. This seems like it may be a big deal, until you take into consideration that the same people you’re facing in arena are the same retards wiping raids by falling asleep on their autowalk button. This isn’t some hyper intelligent advanced alien race you’re competing against, it’s the guy asking “paper or plastic” at the checkout.

Ranking up in arena leads to opponents that know how to play better, and ranking up in PvE pits you against harder bosses that hit harder / faster, or require more precise group coordination. The gear requirements both scale. 1500s arena is going to see you fighting people in afk AV gear that haven’t learned their class mechanics yet. Big deal. It’s the equivalent of running a 5 man in Outlands. As you gear yourself up earning points in that bracket (or drops from those runs), you progress to fighting harder foes.

For some reason, in the 1500s, though, I still seem to be finding people in S3 gear. Maybe they’re carrying a scrub player up to 1850 so he can get some shoulders. Maybe they just disbanded the team to form a new one and try to go 100 wins without a loss or whatever. Regardless, I’ve never zoned into Non-Heroic Ramparts to find Curator as the last boss. I’ve also never wiped over and over in an instance and found epics in my bag from the boss that we never actually killed. Losing in arena still nets you points, although slower. You can form a roster, go into matches naked, /dance to lose ten games, and still get points at the end of the week. There is no equivalent in PvE. Ten wipes is a repair bill (although, if naked, not really), but ten wipes never nets you loot in PvE.

Battlegrounds and raids have common ground. Someone can drag their feet all raid long, and still /roll to win a piece of gear. Blatant AFKing in AV will earn you the debuff, and likewise will get you booted from a raid… but doing just enough to not appear afk is usually enough for AV or a 25 man. Harder to pull off for WSG or ZA where every slot counts, so I guess we have that in common?

Some PvEers will clear Kara, but skip Nightbane because that fight is too hard.

Some PvPers will queue dodge, if they find themselves pitted against a team that’s too hard.

The arguments go back and forth, on and on, but the simple fact stands that these are just two sides of the same coin. Neither aspect of this game is HARD, given that you have a group of like minded individuals with a goal they are working towards. Get a team of ho-hum retards and throw them in a group, and the result is the same, regardless of the destination being PvP or PvE. Epic Fail.

[continue...]