Guild Drama, Just in Time for Christmas

So yeah, today I leave work at 1pm for a week long Christmas / New Year's vacation. This past week has had me sitting at my desk with no classes to teach, but stuck in the teacher's room since there was no legitimate reason to go sit in the English room as classes were over for the semester. Just when I thought I would have a chance to make a raid or two (my guild is primarily based in America), half the guild splinters off to form its own thing, and everyone left behind is stuck with that stupid 'well whatre we gonna do now?' look on their face. A few days back I mentioned a surplus of bitching and moaning over lack of progression, and apparently it's now come to a head.

Merry Christmas, assholes.

The biggest issue here is the aforementioned lack of progress. We have (had) about 120 members in the guild, and I'm not sure how many were alts or people that didn't log on at all. I myself have about 5 or 6 Ixo/Iso/Izobelles in the guild, so those numbers are probably pretty inflated. There was one 10 man group that were kinda like the "A" team, and they would run Naxx every week consistently among themselves from start to finish, and they were kinda recruited as a lump. About 5 or 6 of them knew each other outside of the game, and once they filled out the 4 or 5 other slots they needed, it was a clique within the guild. That happens, and is natural. The 6 or 7 people I know from previous servers that came to Cho'gall ahead of me, and actually sent me emails wondering where I was right before Wrath came out were those in the guild I considered my 'oldest WoW friends'... Tragedy, Razed, Krunchy, Carkom, Pants, Sanctus... these are the people I've moved along from Daggerspine to Scilla, then after a brief jaunt on Oceanic servers, back to Daggerspine, and now to Cho'gall.

Tragedy was our main raid leader, and that guy in the guild that really should just get it over with and reroll European and app for Nihilum or whatever they're calling themselves now. He reads mmo-champion daily, and can quote random gear stats off the top of his head. When this new group splintered off, and took him with them (they 'get shit done') it was kind of a blow, morally, for the rest of us. Now there's this whole stupid drama involved with 'well, I could probably just send Trag a mail and get an invite to the new guild, too, but fuck them for bailing in the first place'. Even sitting at my desk and typing crap like this out just leaves a sour taste in my mouth, because jesus fucking christ, IT'S A FUCKING GAME. So few people tend to understand this anymore. Nobody ran off with my wife, and my child is doing just fine. I still have my job, and make plenty of money to get the rent paid and put food on the table for my family.

At this point, I reckon I'll just bury myself in my alts for a bit, wait for everyone to kiss and make up, and then just rotate back into the picture on my new priest. David kinda really hit the nail on the head in a comment he made a few posts back:


It really is :(



For a brief moment before the expansions, I was in a little guild called Dirty Laundry that a few of us joined out of boredom after having most of the content in the game at the time on farm. They were struggling through Zul'Gurub, and having 5 or 6 fully geared toons suddenly step into their guild and help lead raids and give strats on some of the harder fights (tiger, panther) was huge for them. They were a small casual guild, and the atmosphere after guild first kills for them was such a good vibe, that a few of us actually just stuck around and stayed in it for a while. Eventually, though, around AQ20, loot drama began to spring up where before there was none, and people began to complain about people dragging their feet in raids. It wasn't even us, personally. We already had everything out of there we could want, but once they tasted the nectar of MOAR PURPEL PIXLES it became this... ugly thing.

Ugh, I really need to just spend time playing some Minesweeper or something, where there's no one else to depend on, or no one else to complain that 'you're doing it wrong'.

[continue...]

The Second Best Game Ever

Following a link from Kill Ten Rats, I found a game that embodies the "Achievement Grind" so perfectly, it takes the Second Best Game Ever title here at ixobelle.com... the First Place winner, of course, being a little known MMO I discovered that you may remember from a little while back. Hit "continue..." for the glorious link, and a shameless Kotaku Styled review, just because it's Christmas Day, and I'm at my desk with no classes to teach and fuck all to do until I leave in two more hours!





THE LINK

pros:
-engaging gameplay, accented by awesome unlocked achievements
-achievements unlocking, for the unlocking of achievements
-plot driven, achievement unlocking, character development
-online achievement unlocking achievement
-achievement enhancing achievementy achievements
-achy eve mints

cons:
-some achievements are achieved by achieving achievements
-achievement unlocks are achievement achievements
-acheivement achievement achievement
-please help, i can't stop typing achievement
-omg rescue me from archsisdmcmcdss
-ah that's better
-ACHIEVEMENT! RAWR!

[continue...]

RAF Update

So a while back I RAF-ed myself a second account, and played it a bit, then kinda let it slide as I became more comfortable with my warlock's playstyle. Recently, though, we're suffering from a severe lack of healers (who isn't, right?), and I've kinda taken up the reigns again in earnest. There's a blog called Alt Fanatic that I've been reading for a while, headed up by David Victor, another 'MMO nut living in Japan'. He keeps about eleven toons going strong, all at once, just swapping in and out for rested XP to maximize effective leveling time, and break the monotony of single class tunnel vision. With the Recruit a Friend triple XP bonus, my characters are always 'super rested' though, and it's a bit overwhelming sometimes to pop back and forth.

As of this writing, I'm riding my own accounts out as follows:

Account A (the recruited)
Ixxobelle - 80 warlock
Icsobelle - 58 DK
Ixobelle - 40 priest
Isobelle - 40 rogue
Issobelle - 26 druid

Account B (the recruiter)
Ixoubelle - 7 mage
Izobelle - 40 warrior
(the 80 lock originally came from here)

I also have access to a friend's account with a 78 ret paladin that has been powerleveling my alts on ridiculous single-pull dungeon runs. As long as the 'recruiting' and 'recruited' accounts are within 4 levels of one another, they earn 3x XP for anything. I had initially assumed this applied only to quest turn-ins, but once I realized it applied to farming mobs as well, I basically started just smashing SFK over and over. I would zone the warrior and priest into SFK, sit them down right at the entrance, and go run straight to Fenrus' room in Arugal's tower. I would kite everything all the way back to the entrance, pop ret aura, consecration, and just plow everthing down on the paly while the noobs were AFK. Arugal himself is past a gate where Fenrus resides, and every mob up until Fenrus was a good enough chunk to not bother running back after nuking everything down. Each run like this would take a little over seven minutes, at which point I'd zone everyone out, reset the instance, zone back in, and repeat the process.

I would easily ding the two alts each pull, from level 18 or so till around the late twenties where it started taking two or three runs to ding them. RFK was no go, as those mobs wear plate and have stuns and knockdowns that killed the paly. At that point I tried Scarlet Monastery's Graveyard, Armory, and Library, until I realized that dicking around in the other wings was stupid, as Cath was the easiest to pull in a clump... zone in, run straight to the Cathedral itself, open the doors, and aggro Mograine. He automatically pulls everyone in that room with him (no need to individually aggro the siderooms). Run out of the cathedral, jump down the fountain, heal heal, continue grabbing the mobs on the sides of the fountain, run them back into the first corridor and pew pew pew. Mograine would die, but wouldn't be lootable until I went back and grabbed Whitemaine (ARISE MY CHAMPION... AT YOUR SIDE M'LADY!), and killed her too at the entrance. Cath runs go 6 minutes flat, the biggest lump of dead time being drinking after each run, and eventually running into the brick wall of 'you have entered too many instances recently'.

After hitting 40 on the warrior priest combo, buying mounts for them, and training a ton of skills for the priest I have no clue how to use (I'm familiar with warriors up until 70), I shelved them and tried to think about what to do next.

Here's where it gets kinda weird... The recruited can grant levels back to the recruiter, but only one level per two gained, and only if the toon being granted to is lower than the one granting. I felt like it would be stupid to grant level 1-10, since those are so easy to get anyway, so I rolled the mage/druid combo and started trying to figure out how to plow through the first few levels. The problem here is that a level 78 paladin grants like 6 xp to level one alts (2 XP * 3 = 6), so it's actually better to level them the real way, but working together among themselves. I repeated the same process I originally started with for the warrior/priest combo... using KeyClone to replicate keystrokes across two copies of WoW. Whenever I'd cast Wrath on the druid (the "4" key), the mage activated a macro:

/assist Issobelle
/cast Firebolt

Then sometimes I'd need to pilot the mage to loot wolves for their paws, at which point pushing "5" on my keyboard on the mage's screen would cast Fireball, having the druid activate a similar macro:

/assist Ixoubelle
/cast wrath

I didn't get too in depth with the macros past that point, because two DPS classes burning mobs in tandem is usually enough to get by with. Plus they're both casters, so there's no need to worry about melee range or anything stupid. Just two 800x600 windows running side by side on my main desktop monitor. When controlling the mage, I'd spam 5; when controlling the druid, I'd spam 4.

Easy.

I got to level 7 with both of them in about an hour, just putzing around the UD starting zone, and as soon as I was sent to Brill, I took the blimp to Ogr instead and tried to zone into Ragefire Chasm to begin The Big Easy with the paladin. Turns out I forgot RFC is level 8 to zone in, so I instead spammed my earned level grants to the druid (from the warrior), getting her up to 26. Now the druid is 'ready for SFK or SM', but has no one in the same level range to act as the 300% XP bonus. I could continue to powerlevel the warrior/priest, until they can grant the druid to 40, then work the rogue into the picture... but that would require moving the rogue back over to the other account... bleh, I kinda shot myself in the foot granting the druid up past the mage so quickly.

The other thing that comes into light is thinking about which classes I actually want to play. My original (now banned) account had a combat rogue, resto druid, and prot warrior. I've got DPS covered with my lock, a tank would be fun again on the warrior (although we have good tanks in the guild), and heals are needed the most... I reckon I'll continue grinding the warrior/priest combo through Maradon or whatever up until 60 when the bonus wears off, and I'll actually need to sit down and figure out how the priest actually works to level it in Outlands (another thing I'm not really looking forward to).

While I can look at a site like Alt Fanatic, and wonder how they do it, the entire process for me personally boils down to finding ways around the system. I've done it so many times now that I've refined the system down to the bare minimum required to cut the chaff and accelerate the whole process to "Zone In, Pull Cath, Kite to Entrance, AoE, Zone Out, Reset Instance, Repeat". It's kinda gross when viewed in that light, but the old continents are so devoid of anything that trying to get out of them, and go to the places where the game is actually being played becomes the top priority.

Bleh. I need a new hobby.

[continue...]

Crying Over WoW

My guild has recently become a hotbed of pissing and moaning over 'days long past' and 'the good old days when a rogue would two shot mages and there was no balance'. People in my guild are just pasting random paragraphs in guild chat of emo QQing from the likes of 'teh hardcorez' that feel like WoW is a huge waste of time now. Call me crazy, but when was spending time in WoW anything other than A HUGE WASTE OF TIME? I kinda thought that was the point.

I honestly just think I'm getting too old to care anymore. Like if you went to the playground four-square court at 25 and honestly got involved in the conflict between Billy and Tommy over whether or not 'Insies or Outsies' are allowed this round... it all feels a little trite at this point, and I'm kind of getting embarrassed to be seen at the four-square court in the first place, when I should be doing something more productive with my time.

There's this whole movement now, too, that "WoW is totally catering to the retards now, and everything is totally trivial". When prodded, someone in my guild asked me when the last time I jumped out of my chair shouting when the raid boss was downed. I can say pretty honestly that that's never happened. I've had a few pump-your-fist-and-give-a-quick-"yes!"-over-vent moments, but I guess I'm playing the game wrong if I'm not hopping around like a monkey and flinging my feces when Patchwerk falls over.

The irony came when we wiped four times on Rasuvious the Instructor in Naxx 25. There was much gnashing of teeth, and indirect (as well as point blank) inferences that the priests weren't up to snuff. I tend to get tunnel vision on fights with my new warlock, because I'm still pretty new to the class as a whole, and keeping my DoTs up almost forces me to play like a healer... watching little numbers counting down instead of health bars, but not really focused on what else is going on around me. The culmination was a gkicked priest, much 'THANK GOD'-ing and 'IT'S ABOUT TIME'-ing in gchat, and the immediate dissolution of the raid with much QQing in vent by the officers about lackluster performance, and that we should be recruiting people that aren't retards.

Am I valuable to the guild? If I got gkicked one day, would everyone celebrate my departure? It makes you wonder why we're a guild at all, if everyone celebrates the instant someone is removed. Back to the aforementioned irony though: here we are, wiping on an encounter, but making progress each time (the raid disolved and Csin the Priest was gkicked on a 13% attempt). Isn't that what you guys are complaining about? You want non-trivial encounters? To me that spells out 'shit we wipe on'. Or do you just want shit to fall over when you zone in? How are you ever going to reach a 'jumping around like a retard and shouting in vent' frame of mind if everything is one shotted?

What the fuck is it that you really WANT from the game? We're never going to be a guild of world firsts, and I personally am totally okay with that. I play the game after coming home from my job. I enjoy having some of the people in the guild that I've played with off and on for some years now, but are we REALLY going to get into whether or not Billy was doing Bus Stops on the Line when Tommy totally said that Baby Bouncies was a no-no?

God, I hate this game.

[continue...]

Re: Friendly Fire

I used to play Counterstrike with a friend of mine. He actually played it way more than I did, and he kinda introduced it to me. We'd run the de_dust maps over and over, and I always felt it was pretty stupid that I'd be up in front of him peeking around the corner, we'd see a bad guy, and my friend would dump two clips right through my backside. His bullets somehow recognized that I was this guy's pal, and the bullets would politely pass through my body, until they hit a bad guy, at which point they'd become "real bullets" and kill him. It was all rather silly. Counterstrike wasn't very interesting to me.

After complaining about this to him, he told me that there were "Friendly Fire" servers we could play on where bullets acted like bullets the whole time, and suddenly the game became interesting. The 'old' way of playing was that you'd come around a corner, see a body (any body), and shoot him in the face. If it was a bad guy, hooray, they were dead now. If it was a friend, don't worry, your bullets knew better, and would magically pass through his head. By introducing the actual need to LOOK before shooting, the game took on a whole new level. Add to the fact that (except on the fy_iceworld maps we'd sometimes play) killing a friend meant they had to sit out the remainder of the round, and it added some tense moments to gameplay.

Ever since then, any time I play an FPS, I always filter the server list to only show "FF-on". It just seems like the natural thing to do. I'm not even really good at FPSes, I tend to just unload entire clips into peoples shoes when I'm startled, but we're playing a gun game, for fuck's sake, and guns are dangerous, right?

So the other day when WoW went down for maintenance, a few of us still in vent decided to switch it up, and hey let's play some COD4. We never actually got in a server together, because one guy had the vanilla version, and I and a few others were running Steam... plus we couldn't figure out how to add friends in Steam, and I live in Japan so the pings didn't line up... WHATEVER. The point is, during this fumbling process, I casually mentioned that I only play on FF-on servers, and my friend Tragedy, who up until a short while ago was like some demolitions expert in Iraq defusing landmines and bombs and shit in the military, said he refused to play on FF servers because of morons that fling grenades around willy nilly.

To me, that's kinda the whole point.

You're fighting a common enemy, but you also need to be fully aware of your team mates and surroundings in order to not run out in front of the guy dumping clips like Rambo, or hop over a wall right in front of a claymore. War is hell, etc etc.

Which brings us to another point. I mentioned last night in vent that we should all get the new Runes of Magic open beta, and get world first kills on that game's version of Hogger just for shits. I actually haven't read up on Runes of Magic too intensely, but it's some free to play MMO that's going to go for a microtransaction model to support itself. That alone is a pretty big turnoff, but they've apparently 'ripped WoW off so perfectly' that people are talking. As I was talking about it, someone in vent brought up the page and started reading some bullet list he found. Apparently, when you kill someone in PvP, you can loot one or two items off their body. I never played UO or any game where that was possible, but to me, that sounds pretty shit hot. Along comes Tragedy again to say what a horrible idea that would be, and "if I lost something like my Thunderfury to some random faggot in PvP I'd go kill someone. It would make me just want to camp in the capitol cities and never leave for fear of losing the shit I'd earned". It turns out my friend Trag is a huge pussy, but we still love him regardless.

The fact is that the entire dynamic would shift. It would take a while to soak in, but as it stands now, any loot you earn in WoW is yours forever. Until you decide to sell it, disenchant it, or just outright delete it, there's no way you'll ever LOSE an item unwillingly. Once you got used to the new system, the concept of a bank would take on actual meaning. When you got a drop of that awesome sword of +32 Pew Pew, it would be yours as long as you could protect it. If that meant you kept it locked up in your bank and never used it, then sure, you'd never lose it, hooray. But when you think of it in the new sense, you could actually use that sword to earn new loot. If everyone is a huge pussy, and only wears greys outside of the castle walls because they're afraid of losing thier items then two things happen. One, they're going to have a hard time grinding mobs because they refuse to actually use the loot they earn. Two, those that DO use the good items will steamroll everyone in thier path. This seems like it would lead to wearing better armor (blues and purples), so you actually stand a chance against the steamroll.

As I said earlier, assuming you get a really good weapon, it could actually earn you gear to go kill other players and loot their corpses. This is of course a slippery slope in game design, assuming you want to ensure that the public enjoys playing your game. Suddenly, 5 man groups roaming the countryside are a threat to your gear itself, and so I hope you have five friends too. Suddenly, we're coming across 5 vs 5 man showdowns, and there's no fucking arena involved. No "please queue me up to fight, I'm ready now" bullshit to wade through when you want to kill someone.

This all comes back to the fact that PVE servers are labeled 'normal', and Open RvR servers on Warhammer were shunned at launch, because people want thier PvP to be constrained to the little fenced in area in the corner of the zone. It's silly. I'm not 'out for blood pvp joe', but I've ALWAYS rolled on PvP servers, for the same reason that I always play on FF-on FPS servers. Bullets should hurt. The games have WAR in the title, be it -hammer or -craft.

Take it a step further, and demand that AoE spells (or cleaves, whatever) inflict damage on anyone, be they player or mob. Tragedy refused to even acknowledge this, as "we're playing a fantasy game where I'm a cow that turns into bears, cats, and tudurkens, it's not grounded in reality", which to me is a copout, like saying "we're not even going to have this discussion". The fact is that we throw FIRE balls and shoot LIGHTNING at bad guys. We intuitively know that fire and lightning hurt, so ... uh... your bullets fly thru me and hit him? ok, gg. I've often complained that there's no way to know if that frost trap that just popped on the ground is an 'alliance frost trap or a horde one', and there's no way to know short of stepping on it and seeing if I start to walk slower. Why not have traps affect everyone? It's ridiculous that as a warlock, I can run into the middle of an AoE shitstorm, and pop Hellfire, and watch my health drop, but only because My Hellfire Hurts Me Too. Thank god Blizzard, Hurricane, and Arcane Whatever don't hurt me though... bleh. It's stupid.

The whole problem is the ingrained mentality that "that's just the way it is, if it was different it would be hard".

Anyway. I'm installing Runes of Magic now, maybe it's just bad, but at least it got me thinking about alternate possibilities. Maybe I'll write it up for the next entry.

[continue...]

Welcome to the Internet, Please Fuck You

My favorite part about the internet is the colorful people that reside therein. The "greater internet dickwad theory" is old, so I won't bother reposting the image here, and will instead settle on the random image seen to the left that turned up on page 23 of Google Image's results for 'angry face' (?). Anonymity is a powerful thing, though, and turns otherwise meek individuals into raving racist homophobes, ready to kick anyone's teeth in the second they cross some imaginary line. Maybe it isn't even the anonymity of it, but just the fact that you're physically removed from said encounters, and who can resist making fun of the barking dog that's safely chained just 6 inches out of range? Ventrilo is pretty common these days, and while I still come across people that claim they have a 'broken microphone' (I've managed to make it through 33 years on the planet without ever breaking any of the many microphones I've owned), many will freely speak their mind on any number of topics. Perhaps too freely?

I had an old post over at NA that detailed how I would grief people on my Xbox during football games if I discovered they were assholes. Usually, I'd just play, but the instant they started calling me a 'nigger faggot bitch' after they got an interception, I'd happily drag out each down for 15 minutes or more. I'd still eventually make plays to keep them on their toes, but these people wouldn't quit outright because there was some magical internet score attached to their magical internet xbox live name, and they would refuse to tarnish it with an incrementing number in the magical internet "loss" column.

Fast forward to today where I have a magical internet blog. Writing at NotAddicted used to feel kinda 'official', since they had their own URL and they paid someone way too much actual dollars to design the site's layout. Back when I came aboard, there were about 5 people writing stories in rotation, and then eventually it was just me. It wasn't my 'own' site, though, so I always felt like the people that went there just went to read NotAddicted, and I happened to be the one posting stuff. Trolls would come and crap all over the comments, but for the most part, that was half the fun. Flamewars are fun, and if you aren't being a dick to someone else on the internet, then why bother being on the internet at all? The only comments we actually ever removed were V14grA ads or obvious spam that was posted by a bot.

For the last three or four stories I've posted here, though, there's been one special person that makes a point to come by, read my drivel, and then leave a little note to tell me to die and that they hate me. At first, I *almost* deleted one, because it was kinda right in between two insightful comments that were posting on related topics. It was such a non-sequitir that it irked me, and then I thought a little bit about it, and realized I liked it for that very reason. The randomness of it was my favorite part about it.

I have a piece of plain blue A4 paper in a frame, hanging on my wall at home. The text and images on it are the illustrated death throes of some laser printer from two jobs ago. I sent it a spreadsheet to print, and what came out was just random lines of text in various fonts and random strings of ascii symbols, sometimes even right on top of one another, like it was so busy creating this for me that it forgot to continue moving the paper forward in the printer. Then, about 2/3 of the way down, is some ominous gradient-filled shaded box, and just a big black... bar. Most people would have just thrown it away without a second thought, but I like to think that the printer created something beautiful for me, and I'll always save it. There was an interesting exchange of dialog between Will Smith and the android in that movie 'AI' where Will Smith is saying a robot can never create a masterpiece of art, or compose a symphony, to which the robot asks him "oh, can you do that?", to which Will Smith promptly S-es T F U : )

I will always have Anonymous comments enabled, because I love the randomness of the internet at large, and empowering people to leave their mark (no matter how ridiculous) is a huge part of what the internet 'is'. The second it becomes static, or unilateral, is the second is ceases to be the internet. You don't get to leave comments at the end of a book you just read (well, you could write them there on that last blank page they always include I guess), but the internet allows us to do just that. Plus I enjoy seeing what some random person happened to come by and say, rather than making someone who wants to say "right on, I feel the same" jump thru ten hoops and click stupid links in their email inboxes first.

Rock on, Angry Internet Ixxo Hater. I'm glad you stopped by, and look forward to seeing you again in the future!

[continue...]

I Officially Don't Care About Nihilum

There seems to be this consensus running around WoW whenever the "nerfing of endgame" is brought up. Oh Fucking No! Some fuckers with the ability to raid non stop without jobs defeated the last dungeon already! Some guy who had a group of friends standing by to summon him to zone 42g the instant he was ready to stop farming mobs nonstop in zone 32b (with the help of people outside of his group healing him to full, and killing the mobs he tapped for him) reached level 80 a mere 72 seconds after the release of the new expansion! Wah Wah Wah, the game is totally EZ-MODE now! There are two problems with this mentality. First of all, this isn't how 'normal' people play the game, and B) who fucking cares? It doesn't make my enjoyment of the game ANY different knowing that the boss I'm fighting has already been beaten already.

There's this quote that's brought up in one form another that seems to be the anchor these statements are attached to:

"The pro guilds were the heros of WoW and casuals saw them as their role model."

This quote is lifted verbatim from an article talking about how 2 German guys managed to solo Loatheb. I haven't even read the articles I'm linking here (past the third paragrah where I pulled the quote from in the first link), because I honestly don't care. I right clicked the link the first guy provided, and "copied link location" in Firefox, and am only linking it here in case YOU care enough to read it. Never mind the fact they weren't able to CLEAR to Loatheb alone (they used invis pots to bypass trash), or the fact that without any DPS at all, the fight took 3 1/2 hours. Congratulations on discovering the reason enrage timers are in the game. You have damage mitigation, Mr. Warrior, and your friend Mr. Paladin never runs out of mana. Way to go, I guess I should never bother raiding Naxx now, because there's no point anymore.

The fact that Nihilum and SK-Gaming, two of the world's most 'hardcore' raiding guilds, MERGED to form Novemberseventeenth or whatever is then met with shock and awe that they somehow managed to fite teh scriptzors bosses that they already had on teh farmzors on the PTR is amazing! Let me state for the record that I, normal guy Ixxobelle the warlock, honestly give TWO SHITS* about what bosses they have or haven't fought, or when they did or didn't fight these bosses.

The fact is, I don't play this game with Kunstgen, or Pewzilla, or whoever the guys in those guilds are. I play WoW with Tragedyx and Krunchy and Razed, among others. These are people I've been playing with for a couple of years on and off, and we aren't superheroes of WoW by any stretch of the imagination. We don't suck, but we log off when it gets late (except for Tragedy) , and go to work the next day. Am I alone in the idea that I can continue to play the game even though some crybabies in Europe are 'done' with it? Blizzard has been crapped on internet-wide for the nerfing of the game, and catering to casuals, but did you prefer grinding to Revered before being able to run heroic Ramparts? Did you like the whole Hyjal attunement? Yes, I suppose you felt a sense of really earning it, but fuck... didn't it kinda suck for those that missed that one lucky Kael kill that the guild finally managed to squeeze out by 1% on the main tank, and they weren't there to loot some dumb vial?

We did Naxx 25 for the first time last night, and lo and behold, the first piece of shit trash mob that dropped an epic turned into some huge ordeal ON VENT from some fucking healer about whether or not we were going to just /roll 100, or "make a decision based on who put in the hard work to get us to this point". I wanted to stab myself in the face, because "forming a raid and zoning in" isn't a huge ordeal anymore. Thank God. Yes, you ran heroics. Congratulations, Mr. Resto Tree. We are all very happy for your continued perserverance. I still get pissed when people complain about DPS numbers even at the end of runs. Gosh, sorry my DPS was only 1932 instead of 2017. Gee, we all managed to somehow survive and here we are, looting the last boss, so why are you complaining? I guess I accidentally Shadowflamed that one time when I should have Seeded. That misclick cost me .3465 of potential DPS. Hold on, lemme get my spreadsheets out...

Do you see how my articles start out complaining about Nihilum, and end up bitching about retards in heroics? IT"S BECAUSE THOS EFUCKERS BEAT NAXX THE DAY AFTER RELEASE! GOD I HATE THEM SOFUCKIG MUCH THEY[VE MADE MY LIFE SO APOINTLLSESSSLKJKJSJSDKJDCFHFJHJCKJ FUCK FCUK FUCK


*I actually was about to post two pictures of nice big turds for your viewing pleasure, and then I started searching Google Images for "turd" and "shit" and lost my desire to do so after the first or second page of results.

[continue...]

Phasing, Take Two

Okay, so maybe I was a bit harsh on phasing. In my limited exposure to it, it seemed pretty stupid, and writing an article titled "Phasing is Dumb" pretty much summed up how I felt about it. Now I've gotten a bit further, come across more of it, and can say pretty honestly that... well, yeah. It's still kinda dumb. But! I've seen a few nifty things they're doing with it, and can at least respect it more, even if I don't outright LIKE it.

I mentioned before that one of my biggest issues is split playerbases, and 'fake' progress in the world. I've heard twice in the last week two guildies in vent trying to find each other that are "standing right next to each other on the map"; the solution being to move away from wherever they are until they can see each other once again. I've been questing solo myself for a majority of time, but it'd be interesting to see if I can find a guildie to run some tests with in this regard. Start at point A, and march towards B until the person right beside you disappears.

Phasing seems to project these bubbles of sorts ("reality distortion fields", for those of you on Macs), but it's weird if you have your graphics turned way up. There's one quest chain in Storm Peaks where these iron dwarves are building a big robot colossus type thing, and for a while, the giant dwarf statue is "being worked on" on the side of a mountain with scaffolding everywhere. Then they finish it, and it walks around the area. The problem is, the "covered by scaffolding" is the giant's default setting, and doesn't change until you've gone further in the chain. With my graphics cranked up, and the draw distance set to max, I can actually see the giant surrounded by scaffolding in the distance as I fly towards it, then I get within the zone of change, and it pops out of existence because for ME, it's not there anymore. It's just awkward.

Another interesting test would be to fight a mob that only exists in a phase while partied with my fellow experimenter. The iron dwarf giant would work. They'd see me taking damage in the party window (they wouldn't be able to SEE me though, because we'd be in different phases). Could they heal me if we were within 30 yards of one another? If we both stayed near a specific landmark, for example. What if I kited the giant to the edge of the phase? Would they leash back and evade? Probably.

Some interesting things to try out when I have more free time, for sure.

Today's "Complaining Lore Nerd Moment" is brought to you by the giants of Hodir, who you shoot with flaming pitch and generally harass the hell out of for a good 8 or 9 quests, until they befriend you and begin offering you daily quests. "Don't worry about that whole killing us and catching us on fire, Ixo! Go grab some frozen doodads, and blow some horn or something for today's daily quests! You'll eventually need shoulder enchants, and we can totally dig that!"

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"Phasing" is Dumb

Here's something I don't really understand: everyone with their panties in a bunch over this "new technology" Blizzard has decided to grace us with for Wrath. It's called Phasing, and is basically putting your player in an instance. Is that new? Revolutionary? Hardly. I've been in instances in WoW since I first ran a dungeon, and I seem to remember people complaining back then that instances ruined the overall 'one world' feeling. While I don't hate instancing in WoW's current implementation, I don't understand why everyone is suddenly so goo-goo ga-ga over this 'new' version of it.

First of all, instancing. I think it's a good thing, because if there was one version of Wailing Caverns for the entire world to farm blues out of, every. single. mob. in there would be camped to death. You simply can't have "a cave" in the world where bosses hide out and not expect EQ1 style 48 hour camping of the mob's spawn point so it can be instantly tapped and killed. That's not fun. Having your own little version of the dungeon available to everyone that wants to run it is a good thing. When I pass through the swirly doorway, I know I'm in my own little parallel dimension of WoW, and don't expect to see my guild mates that are also running the same dungeon in a different group.

This is thrown on its face when we're phased into a different area in the outside world, and we begin to see things that those around us don't. Certain quest giving NPCs are only visible if you're at that point in the chain, which seems like it would lead to confusion in group chat when "he's standing right in fucking front of you" but the other guy doesn't see it. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the concept of it, feel free to correct me. My limited exposure to it has been the starting area of the Death Knights, and the Wrath Gate quest line. If you've been living under a rock for the last month or so, the next few paragraphs may contain spoilers, whatever.

With the Death Knights, the area surrounding Ebon Hold changes over the course of your questing, from 'a regular Tyr's Hand style zone', to 'a flaming Tyr's Hand style zone'. It's my understanding that the only other player characters you'll come across are people in the same point in the DK starting chain. So if you're three quests in and the barn is on fire and you see Sally, she's three quests in and the barn is on fire for her, too. If your friend Thomas is only two quests in and the barn is still just a barn, he won't see you or Sally, even though you're all 'standing on the east side of the barn, next to the well'. This technology is being praised as 'finally giving your surrounding areas a sense of change' but the change is only on YOUR screen (and Sally's). It's not a real change to the outside world, and in fact, Thomas will tell you "the barn is totally fine, what the fuck are you going on about?"

Therein lies my main issue with it. Either actually change the world, or don't, but don't do this 'persons 1, 5, and 12 see this, while 3, 7, and 9 see that' kind of crap.

The other implementation of phasing I've come across is the Wrath Gate questline, which is apparently giving lore-nerds all over the world huge raging erections, but for me personally was just a big 'whoop de doo'. I'm going to totally ruin this quest in full detail to make a few points, so you've been warned.

The Wrath Gate questline is supposed to be some big interaction with the Lich King himself, which it kind of is. Blizz is trying to make you, as the player, more intimately aware of (and involved in) the end game conflict, so when you reach the final battle you aren't like "Illidan? He's an elf, right? I think I saw him show up for some quest dialog text in Shadowmoon Valley once". That's cool, I can dig it. I just dinged 79 on my lock last night, and decided I'd undertake this epic quest line and ride it out as a straight shot to 80. In order to actually start the 'actual' quest line, you need to have finished a bunch of minor (somewhat unrelated) quest lines in various zones first. Looking at wowwiki, I realized I was already on the last leg of the last required chain anyway, so it wouldn't be so hard to get this ball rolling. I knocked out the last of Alexstraza's requests in Dragon Blight, and was finally sent to report in to Young Saurfang at the Wrath Gate itself.

Once there, the game suddenly shifts to a cutscene that I had already heard much ranting and raving about in guild vent and general posts on forums or whatever. I was expecting full Blizzard cinematic intro like when you start the game for the first time... like 'Final Fantasy the Movie' kinda stuff, a fully rendered cut scene. Instead, you're given a machimina style thing using the ingame engine. Okay... that's cool, whatever, let's see what happens. Huh, it's like alliance guys going on and on about something, but I'm a Hordie... oh! There's the Horde! Go team! Young Saurfang cleaving three elites in the face, woo!

Then it gets weird... the Lich King comes out and one shots Young Saurfang, and is about to one shot the alliance guy, when who should show up to kick everyone's ass but the FORSAKEN, my home team?! Not the SCOURGE, who are the bad buys, but the FORSAKEN, who are the whole undead playable race. Yet this is somehow a bad thing, because those dirty undead are totally jerks for wanting to kill the alliance and Lich King, and anyone alive.


Okay stop. Just hold on.

I know this is an article about phasing, but I've really kinda branched off here and need to tie this off. I'm undead. Every toon I roll is an undead girl with the same hair color, hair syle, skin color and face as the last one. I roll another Isobelle, and just choose a new class. I roll undead, exclusively. I can break fear, eat dead people, and have a bonus +10 to shadow resist on all of my toons. That's me, the one with no skin on my knees or elbows. Ever since I left my starting area, and ventured to Brill, I've been on one quest or another to create the 'new plague' that will wipe out EVERYONE. Yeah, we're Horde, but that's just a convenience thing. It's like a black guy who says "Yeah, I'm a democrat, but I'm black first and foremost".

One of my main quest themes throughout the entire game, given to me by my undead bretheren, has been to formulate this new plague. It's meant to be a way for the undead to eradicate the Scourge (the 'bad undead'), as well as the humans, elves, dwarves, trolls, orcs... pretty much anything other than themselves. Yeah, it's kinda dick, but that's MY TEAM. So here comes my team, chucking finished buckets of the new plague on everyone, and even the Lich King himself runs like a little ol' bitch back into his castle and locks the door behind him. Hooray! We win! Right...?

No.

I'm instructed to go through some portal to Ogrimmar to meet with Thrall, and discuss how we can beat up the undead. Call me crazy, but if a portal to the Ku Klux Klan's headquarters opened up, and young Dwayne A. Black was instructed to go through the portal to discuss how to 'set those blacks straight' how would this go over? Here's an idea, let's have a portal to Auschwitz open up, and send the Jew thru it so he can figure out how to make the Nazis win! Bad analogies aside, why would I want to go fight the Undead, when I AM UNDEAD? Maybe it makes more sense as a troll? Probably makes way more sense as a human. Whatever.

I go to see Thrall in a phased version of Ogrimmar where the bank works, but there are no vendors or anyone that can repair my gear, oddly. Even more strange is that the trade channel still works, so in between every line of 'important lore dialog' I get spammed for gold sales, people announcing all the crap they just put on the AH, and the usual routine of dick and fart jokes. Plus there are dozens of forsaken refugees laying around and SLEEPING all over Ogrimmar. That's the undead for ya, a buncha lazy good for nothing leechers. God! This is 'my own phased version of Ogrimmar', so there are no other actual players, and I have to wonder if anyone else was on the same quest part if I would have seen them as well?

Thrall and Sylvanas (some ex-elf tramp calling herself a banshee queen, and claiming to be a FORSAKEN herself) now decide we need to kick the Undead's asses, because they've managed to take over the Undercity... you know, our CAPITOL CITY? So here comes ol' Ixxobelle the Undead Warlock, ready to sell my whole race out to get on Thrall's Christmas card mailing list or whatever. We port to another phased version of the Undercity. Just for kicks, I ran to Brill just to see if there was an 'edge' to the phasing, and found no NPCs anywhere. At the UC, though, demons are everywhere, and the ground is covered with plague gasses. A mysterious 5 minute timer begins, so I stand around for 300 seconds just... uhhh... waiting. I assume this gives anyone else on the questline a chance to 'join me' in the ransacking of my hometown, but being in Japan, I was doing this at odd hours during the server, so no one else popped in. As time goes on, I reckon it'll be more and more rare for anyone to happen to line up on this one quest at the exact same time, unless two friends actively decide to line it up.

Next comes the 'fun' part. Sylvanas starts to sing, which gives me like 44k health and basically unlimited heals, and Thrall and her walk painfully slowly through the Undercity, mopping up demons and fighting a boss or two. This whole part is the biggest boner-giver to everyone that seems to have done this quest, but for me it was just long and tedious. I started out in earnest, throwing Seeds of Corruption around and spamming Searing Pain, until I realized that I was basically in God Mode and couldn't die. Then I tried to kill myself by just running into the densest pack of big mobs I could find and just Hellfiring over and over.
I couldn't die, no XP was being awarded, and Thrall and Sylvanas kept walking as slow as possible while emoting the same things over and over (Sylvanas: My aim be true! My aim be true! My aim be true! My aim be ---aguahgahghg shut the fuck up!). At this point, I just took my weapon off, started leveling my unarmed skill, and played with the talent calculator in Wowhead on my 2nd monitor and trying to figure out what spec I was going to use at 80.
Call me jaded, but there was no point for me being there, nothing I did had any impact at all, and there was no fear of dying. On top of that, I was still a little pissed about the lack of choice in selling out my race. I was being forced to be Thrall's Bitch, and there was nothing I could do about it.

In the end, it was basically a HUGE drawn out interactive cutscene showing how Thrall and Sylvanas 'took back' the Undercity, I recieved a pair of trashy blue pants that were garbage compared to what I was wearing, and the whole ordeal netted me something like 3% of a level for something like an hour plus of playtime. I could have gotten more XP / reward / fun out of doing a single 5 man run, and wouldn't have been forced to crap all over my race in the process. After it's all done, the mysterious 5 minute timer pops back up saying 'this event will reset in 5 min'. No thanks!

So now it's over, and what's changed? The Undercity, Ogrimmar and the rest of the world went right back to exactly how it was before. There's one change I could imagine that may have taken place, but I'm at work right now and can't log in to check. Can you guess what it is? It's pretty minor! The only change I could imagine that would make any sense at all would be the Young Suarfang NPC being gone forever from outside of the Wrath Gate. The site of the big conflict, where the undead chucked the barrels of poison down on everyone below got razed by dragons after the whole ordeal, and maybe that area of the map is burned from now on for me, but I'll have to check when I get home tonight. If that's the case, we run into the paradox thing from before where I'm in a group with someone who hasn't done that questline yet and I'm like "wow that area sure is burned, huh?" and he's like "huh? looks fine to me".


Conan was reviled for it's random instancing of the outside world, where you and your friend would need to join Conall Valley 34a to see each other, or you could just jump over to 37b if you got ganked once in world PvP. Warhammer ran into some flack earlier on for having your cloak and some emotes appear differently to yourself and other players. At guild level 15, you could put a guild logo of sorts on your cloak, but after a while people realized only YOU saw this (the cloak has since been changed after enough people cried about it). Having 'local client-side only' effects kinda defeats the purpose... like you could do a model swap to make your lame level 1 1h mace look like Thunderfury, but only YOU see it, so what's the point? Warhammer emotes apparently weren't even visiable at all to other players which COMPLETELY defeats the point. A cloak? Whatever. But if you're going to /wave, and have it only show up on YOUR screen? It's a slippery slope.

With the whole phasing thing, I feel like this is a bad path to go down, because the more people that are like "hey! I love this new thing where the world changes, who cares if it's only for me!", then Blizzard feels like this is an okay solution to add immersion to the outside world. Maybe later, in your version of the world Ogrimmar has burned down, but I'm still standing inside the AH, doing my thing. All that's going to do is separate people from one another. I'd much rather prefer that Ogrimmar burned down for everyone.

And I'm not just saying that because Thrall's a jerk that thinks all the Undead are sellout shits. Seriously. : /

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