Month: April 2009

I’m not sure if it’s the fact that it is a dreary and sullen Thursday or that I am under the gun to finish up a website replication component for a project here at work, but I have zero “oomph” create a passable blog today.  I promised myself that I would try and post at least something everyday so what you are getting now is the result.  For those of you not old enough to get the title…  [click here carefully]

I am continuing my descent into the wow blogosphere.  Been connecting a bit with some of the other authors and spending a good deal of time between tasks reading various topics.  I figure it might be at least an informative topic to share some of the things I found interesting.

You down with CPP?

Stabs over at Death Knight Spree presents us with the concept known as the Consumer-Producer Paradigm as applied to MMO games like WoW.  The 500 ft view is that essentially everyone breaks down into the role of consumer or producer in this game, and various classes tend to split along certain lines.  Stabs has a short questionnaire to help you determine which role you play.  On the quiz I scored 6 to 3 that I was a producer, which based on the theory is pretty obvious considering I’m a guild and raid leader.

I think it’s a nice clean elegant theory, but in real application it breaks down a bit.  I don’t feel that anyone really can be defined in such simple terms.  I tend to think of players breaking into 4 basic groups, and I plan on elaborating on this at a later date, but the quick summary is like this.

• Proactive:  These players make up your leaders, they are the self starters who are either by choice or by lack of other options organizing and helping others.  Proactive represent the small group of players that make things happen and get the job done by giving the other players something to rally around.
• Active:  These are the players that are always willing to help out and respond openly in chat when someone requests something.  They rarely organize a group but are the first to align themselves with an initiative when one is formed.  These are the supporting staff that no guild could survive without.
• Reactive:  These are the players who want to participate but for some reason do not understand how to.  Either by shyness or unfamiliarity with others, they tend to only respond when contacted directly and asked point blank questions.  These players tend to be live on the fringe of activities, often times less than reliable, and often times bad with communicating their needs.  However with “handholding” they can become very valuable members of a team.
• Inactive:  The Solo-artist.  These are the players that exist on the outsides of the group.  They play an MMO like a single player game, concerned with their own needs and only interacting with the community when they directly need something from another person.  Often times these players enter a guild on the coat tails of another member, but do not feel like they are a true part of the guild.

Nonetheless both approaches are food for thought.  There are several other bloggers discussing this concept but one of the better breakdowns comes from Larisa at The Pink Pigtail Inn.  I hope to revisit this whole concept in a proper post but for now I would just suggest you spend some time reading the posts.

Does the MMO Market ignore the female audience?

There are several blogs out there to this effect, but one of the best posts I have read lately is from Spinks over on Spinksville entitled “Is it time to stop making MMOs for a hardcore male audience?”.  I am not sure what the magic bullet is, but considering there are more female gamers playing WoW than any previous MMO I have played it appears the blizzard has hit on a formula that is at least working.  Sure there are controversies, like bikini plate mail, and the playboy bunny quest.  Personally I find the image on the left for “Ultimate Games for Girls” more condescending but I was informed by a friend of mine that those are in fact games little girls like.  Both articles however are good reads and I suggest doing so.

Drinking the Kool-Aid

I’ve been using the Curse Gaming updater for awhile now without any issue.  In fact I’ve gotten rather addicted to it.  Somehow I managed to get in on the beta test period for the premium features, so I have had access to all the nifty things like auto updating of add-ons for the entire time I have been running it.  Last night however, they shut off the morphine drip… and in a moment of weakness I subscribed for a year to their premium service.  I will let you guys know if they are in fact the devil.

I’m not entirely how, but I have managed to create a blog post… about nothing.  I promise real, semi-intelligent content soon!

Last night was the much anticipated first Ulduar raid for Duranub Raiding Company.  Most other groups have been banging against the zone for two weeks, but we tend to take a more measured approach at things.  Our timetable was in part to account for the fact that playing on Argent Dawn after a major patch means you will be dealing with raid crippling lag and instance instability, which is especially true for a raid that starts late in the evening like we do.  The other component was to have a week to say goodbye to the tier 7.5 content and let everyone have one last shot at those items they never could get before.

Maybe this was a bad idea as last week ushered in some of the absolute worst performances our team has exhibited.  However I did end up with far fewer abyss crystals than previous weeks, and we had a good number of points exchanging hands as loot gear awarded.  Personally I was able to pick up a few items that had eluded me up to this point: Sabatons of Endurance and Rune of Repulsion.  Both items I believe well help with my personal survivability moving forward, which is pretty great being the main tank and all.

The Confused Start

After explaining the fight, sorting out vehicle assignments… and re-explaining the fight we started roughly 40 minutes behind schedule.  For some raids this wouldn’t be a huge ordeal, but for Duranub when you are talking about a pool of only 2 1/2 hours, 40 minutes lost means quite a lot.  We start clearing trash and folks start to get their feel for each of the vehicles.  It goes for the most part pretty smoothly, until we got to the courtyard for the Leviathan fight.

Before I can get the warning of not to pull the last two constructs we have already done it.  I start giving frantic instructions over ventrilo, and telling players to move up to the first “brown line” on the floor.  As predicted a few players were not paying attention and got locked out.  We fail miserably on this attempt across the board.  Nothing was done correctly, however this was to be expected. Leviathan is not one of those fights that you can really explain, you have to experience it.

Adding insult to injury, one of the locked out players draws aggro and Leviathan twitches through the gate.  This in turn resets the encounter, which would have been awesome had everyone moved out of range.  However we fail at this as well and he simply resets only to aggro again.  I call the wipe and we start running back, trying to tweak and fine tune things over officer chat and open ventrilo as we go.

Gears sliding into place

The next try things start to happen.  The cycles lay down a good kiting circle of tar and keep it up.  The siege engines and demolishers are better about kiting onto the tar.  The catapult team still for the most part fails, but we at least get a few players up top and get one overcharge phase.  The end result has us getting him down to 25%. I know that if we tighten up a few more things, we have this fight.

Some last minute tweaks go out over ventrilo and we try again.  For the first time we get the entire catapult team up top, and get an overcharge early into the fight.  The kiting is much better as a whole, and the motorcycles start doing a decent job of picking up players as they get knocked off.  The interrupts on flame jets are also happening pretty reliably.  Players are starting to communicate freely on ventrilo, calling out timers and aggro shifts.  All the gears engage and the fight just clicks.  While there was the frantic burndown that always seems to occur on a first kill.   We managed to pull across the finish line without much issue.

Iron Riveted War Helm – Mimiron’s Inferno Couplings – Steamworker’s Goggles

I am very proud of the team.  In all honestly, I was more than a bit on edge about last night. Our performances the week before had been extremely bad, however we all rose to the occasion and pulled out some excellent performances on progression content. 

We moved on to Razorscale and came close to the transition on one of our attempts.  That fight is going to take a good deal of organizing and fine tuning. However I was pretty pumped that we did not get completely blown out of the water, as I have heard so many raids do.  Without a doubt I feel we are truly ready to start making a dent in Ulduar.  Thursday we should tweak our strategy, get some solid attempts in, and with any luck a Razorscale death.

Raid Content:  I missed you

It feels so much that Ulduar is what Naxxramas should have been.  This is real actual raid content, and for the first time since the release of Wrath I felt actually challenged.  Naxxramas had a good number of stupidity checks, but if your players paid attention it was not unlikely that you could clear almost the entire thing on your first time in.  It was very much the Upper Blackrock Spire of Northrend.

Ulduar however in every aspect of the word feels epic.  God how I have missed this style of content.  I freely admit that it will take us months to clear the zone, and that fact excites me.  Each boss will be hard fought, and as a result will love every minute of it.  Sure, it is going to force our raid to step it’s game up.  Simply proving that we have a cerebellum will not cut it anymore.  But in the end, we will be a far better group for it.

Ulduar is the infusion that I needed to keep this game fresh and enjoyable.  Sure, I will be paying a hefty repair bill at the end of every night, but at least it will feel like I earned it.  In Naxxramas as the main tank, the only time I frequently died was when someone else screwed up (thaddius I hate you).  We never wiped because the fight was tough, or we did not understand the mechanics…  we wiped because someone was stupid.

 

Thanks Blizzard for bringing back raiding.

This is my first attempt at a “Shared Topic”.  I apologize to the good readers of Blog Azeroth as I did not really understand this concept at first.  But now that I at least think I do, I am attempting to “write” the wrong as it were.  The topic question was posted on the BA forums and for those who like me were not familiar with the concept of a shared topic, the idea is essentially to have multiple authors write about the same topic.  Feeling rather daring, here goes nothing.

Fragments of Sanity

Honestly the issue of deciding who is going to get the Fragment of Val’anyr is something that somewhat “snuck up” on us and is fixing to “bite us in the butt”.  We stand on the precipice of our first Ulduar raid tonight, and the issue is still very much under discussion.  I feel confident that the officers will hash out something throughout the day and make our professional-esc decision before we start the invites tonight.

The whole issue of who gets the Fragments honestly gives me a massive feeling of Déjà Vu, as should it any group that’s been around long enough to have raided the original Naxxramas.  If you remember back into the annals of time we have dealt with this same issue regarding the Splinter of Atiesh used to create the previous omg-caster-legendary Atiesh.

The deciding of the loot process for it was somewhat of a debacle, but not because of the design.  The low drop rate combined with the general horrible luck that our raid had (never saw a single binding of the windseeker in 2 years of raiding MC) meant that nobody even got vaguely close to the “staff of awesomeness”.  What we were left with were a few scattered splinters and everyone with a nice hollow feeling.

The Shattered Plan

As we now sit on the verge of our first foray into Ulduar I see that we are starting to arrive at a similar play for distribution.  The Elders have all agreed that this item is far too precious to allow it to go to something and fickle as random chance.  We use a Zero Sum dkp system with a 5 week vesting period, so in theory it would be conceivable for one of our less seasoned and dedicated players could wind up winning a pure bid war as well.  In addition, the last thing we want to do is reward a player who has been hording points and in essence hurting the performance of the raid by not taking upgrades.  Simply dictating which player is going to receive the item also seems heavy-handed and unfair.

We are far from a hardcore raid.  We only exist by the cohesion of the players, and in making this key decision we have to be conscious of this.  So right now the “best” avenue appears to be an open vote.  Our raid is organized into function teams;  The tank team, the healer team, the caster team, and the melee team.  Thanks to the dual specs, these lines are a little bit more blurry than they used to be but in general we still organize along those lines.  What appears to be the fairest method is to put choosing the first candidate for Val’anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings up to a vote of the active primary healers.

The Theory

So as it stands right now, it is looking like a vote will be made by the active healers in the raid.  Who better to choose a worthy holder of the legendary weapon than those in the healing trenches?  To keep things fair and unbiased, the vote will be held in private tells to a non-healer officer and tabulated at the start of our raid tonight.  This player will become our first candidate for the epic.

Now the big point of debate is who much this “right” is going to cost the member, and how we are going to deal with points.  Since Zero Sum dkp works best when there is a steady trickle of points, as it stands right not we are looking at a fixed point per Fragment, and then a kicker cost a the end when the weapon is created.  This should serve two main purposes for the overall health of the raid.  The first is that the point drain will cause points to keep flowing into the system for the players who attend each raid where a fragment drops.  Secondly this places the chosen healer in a position where they are less likely to be able to contend with the other healers for “first drops”, making it at least fairer to all in the system.  If for some reason the chosen player cannot attend a raid on which a fragment drops, the spot of “second legendary” will be put up to an open bid.

Is this going to work?  Is this going to be fair to all players involved?  Is this even going to be the solution we wind up doing tonight?  In all honesty I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but for now it appears like for the good of our raid, this is the best possible solution.  Only time is going to tell whether or not this scheme is going to work better with Val’anyr than it did with Atiesh.  At least in this scenario we are dealing with a smaller pool of potential players, which in my mind can only help the process.

 

I had originally planned on this great post contrasting my 5 favorite raid mechanics and my 5 most hated raid mechanics, but on the day after Eggs-mageddon I had to post a note about the holiday event. First off, let me open this with the blanket statement of…  damn you Blizzard for giving me the carrot that is the Violet Proto Drake.  As a result, I am obsessed with obtaining every holiday title so that come brew fest I can get the drake. 

The key point here that you all need to know… is that I HATE the holiday events with deep burning passion.  I enjoy the events like brew fest, hallows eve, and fire festival because they have “bosses”.  Killing a boss over and over for epics is fun, doing a bazillion mind numbing meta-achievements however is not.  Needless to say, I am not the player this content was designed for, however I feel obsessed to conquer it much like a raid boss…  but in this case it isn’t for loot, its for the reward of never having to do it again.

Somehow I guess I had blotted out of my mind that yesterday would be lost completely to mindlessly playing a game of trying to get to the egg spawns before all the other players.  I was still logged in Saturday night/Sunday morning when the content rolled in and players in guild started talking about it.  I cringed knowing that my Sunday would be lost no matter how hard I tried to avoid doing so.  I found a sweet spot in Kharanos at the start where I could reach two eggs.  However anytime I was a second late clicking the egg as it would spawn, I would miss out and end up cursing wildly. 

I am not a friendly player during these events.  I turn into an obsessive and boorish asshole, and I decorated our guild chat with more expletives than I have said in months.  Why you ask?  Because my luck is horrible.  I was one of those 7/8 people back during the Valentines event.  I got 4 bags of candy, and managed to still wind up one candy short of the title.  So going into Noblegarden I expected that I was going to need the 305 chocolate candy that is required to acquire all of the BoP items needed to get the title.

Sad thing is… this assumption was not far off.  After 165 eggs carefully stole from unwitting players also vying for them I got my very first non chocolate drop, the White Tuxedo shirt.  Another 15 eggs later I got a duplicate.  I took a break after 205 eggs, and did the Chocoholic achievement, bought my Spring Robes and Spring Flowers and proceeded to try and get as many achievements done as I could, so I would at least feel like I had made some progress for wasting my entire day.

Honestly the Shake your Bunny-Maker achievement was far easier than I had thought it was going to be.  Honestly being able to dual box and log in a horde alt to communicate with players was invaluable, but I imagine that /beg and /wait used together would have done the same thing.  I set out to grab all the horde players first, and within a hour or so I had all of them knocked out.  Then I grabbed the rarer alliance first, leaving dwarf female for last since we have several of those in guild that I would harangue into coming to Dalaran.

Finally this left me with nothing left standing in the way of my title other than the Spring Rabbit.  So I grabbed a fresh drink and sat down resigned to knowing that I was going to have to farm up another 100 Chocolate Eggs in order to buy it and complete the title.  I had already done 205 to this point, I could handle another 100, I could brute force my way through this.  Finally my luck started to pay off, around egg 250 I got the Rabbit’s foot to drop.  After some ping ponging around the map, I got my Noble Gardner achievement and I was done with this hell by around 3:00 pm server.  So now I sit on the near side of the mount, 5/8 titles out of the way.

The stuff that didn’t suck…

The key point of the weekend was Saturday night I got asked to fill in as DPS in a friends semi-pug Ulduar raid.  They use the shroud system for loot, which I was unfamiliar with, but I went in to experience some of the fights and not for loot.  We are planning on taking Duranub into Ulduar for the first time this Tuesday, so to me any pre-game reconnaissance was invaluable since in a few short days I would be expected to lead the troops through the content.

We downed Flame Leviathan without much issue.  It’s a very fun fight, or at least I enjoyed it far more than I expected to with a “vehicle fight” (damn you Malygos phase 3, damn you all to hell!).  I played a chopper, which was ridiculously fun laying down patches of tar for the kiters.  I think honestly what makes this fight fun, is movement is in the 2D plane, no more trying to gauge distance and height and all that crap.  My friend Aigie who also went along on the run managed to pull out a winning bid on the epic priest gloves, so was I thought going to be our high point for the evening.

However we move on to Razorscale, and through much work we manage to down him.  This was coincidentally this groups first time doing so, so everyone was very pumped.  I click the corpse and see it… the object of my growing obsession.  See when it comes to loot, I tend to obsess over whatever item is the hardest to find a replacement for.  In BC it was The Unbreakable Will, in Naxxramas it was Slayer of the Lifeless, and there on the corpse was my current obession…  Veranus’ Bane.

I am thinking to myself… there is no way in hell I am getting it, but I will bid all my points.  Turns out, this group apparently has NO warrior tanks, and none of the dps were willing to risk any significant amount of points on an offspec ranged weapon.  So now here I sit, not even really raiding Ulduar in earnest yet with the best tank gun in the game already acquired. 

 

Life is good 🙂