January 2014 - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Bucket Update

January 7, 2014 by Belghast

Not As Bad As Could Be

So yesterday was my first day back from vacation, and I have to say it was nowhere near as painful as I had imagined. Sure over the last few days I had set an alarm for 7 am to start getting my body back in the swing of things, however there is still a large difference between that at the normal 5:30 am I wake up each day. Sure the morning itself sucked, and I think I grumbled a bit about it yesterday, but as the day moved on I found myself doing mostly okay. Of course it is still absolutely silly cold outside, but then again so is the rest of the country. In the grand scheme of things our near zero temperatures are “mild” compared to the areas that are legitimately in the negatives.

The drive in was surprisingly tame, sure there were a few slick spots here and there but as the northerners say… snow is actually not that bad to drive on. I feel as though I could deal with snow being on the road, and not our normal inch or two of ice. Granted supposedly there is some ice under the snow, so if you start losing traction there is absolutely nothing to gain footing on… but if you drive rationally it seems to be just fine. The problem is I live in Oklahoma… and we are not known for driving rationally. I watched a redneck on the way home purposefully spinning his tires and fishtailing all over the street outside of my house. I halfway expected him to end up hitting a house or something the amount of movement he was making around out there. Here is hoping I can get out on the roads and have a similar safe driving experience this morning.

Bucket Update

Yesterday I finished leveling Archaeology to 600, and I knew without a doubt that was something on my wow bucket list. So this morning I thought I would take a moment to cross a few things off. I have actually made quite a bit more progress than I had originally thought. Seems as thought I have knocked the following things off the list.

Level Gloam to 90
Level Alchemy to 600 on Gloam
Level Tailoring to 600 on Belglorian
Get Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth
Level Archeology to 600 on Belgrave

To be truthful I have not really worked that hard on knocking things off I just piddled around or as @AlternativeChat says “Faffed”. I have to say hands down the best money I have ever spent in any game is the 14,000 gold to purchase the Traveler’s mount. I use the thing constantly, especially when I am out farming resources. On my lowbies, like my Horde Warrior it has made leveling him so much easier as I am always near a vendor… and it seems like the Barrens now drops a truly silly number of patterns.

As of last night we have tentative plans to start working on some of the old world mount achievements. Here is hoping with that I can start knocking out various other bits from my list. I have to say I am still very much enjoying the game and keep finding new things I want to do. Right now I am running a truly silly amount of LFR as I have 6 characters that could use gear. However when I need a break from LFR I am slowly working my way to 90 on my Disc Priest Belglorian. I really want to get him up to the cap so I can start doing the daily tailoring cooldown. Currently 81 is a bit too low to be able to survive Pandaria.

Slow News Day

I honestly do not have a lot going on this morning to talk about other than these few updates. I am woefully behind on reading my RSS feed, since I really did not keep up with it at all while I was off work. Why would I be reading webpages when I could be playing games? I feel bad that I am this far behind. I know there is a lot of gaming news that I am missing out on, so hopefully I can spend some time to day catching myself back up. In the meantime I will leave you with this awesome fan trailer by Qelric. There has been a thread going around the community requesting a Diablo universe version of Hearthstone, called Soulstone. I fully support this notion, and I really should be playing more hearthstone myself.

WoW Needs a Gatekeeper

January 6, 2014 by Belghast

Content Gating

One of the constructs from EQ that existed in the early days of World of Warcraft was the concept of content gating. It still exists to a lesser extent but nothing like it did when there were formal quest requirements for entry to most of the raids. These were extremely frustrating barriers, not because they existed but because they required the entire raid to complete. Potentially the worst was the Vials of Eternity quest chain needed to enter Mount Hyjal. At the time this meant that in order to run the Tier 6 content, you had to find a group willing to take you through the Tier 5 content in its entirety, as you needed drops off Vashj and Kaelthas the end bosses of the two Tier 5 raids.

At the time this posed so many logistical problems for raids, as you were left with two somewhat unsavory choices. Firstly you could stop what you were doing in your current progression and run the Tier 5 content to prepare newer players for Tier 6. This took time, and most raids already had pretty tight schedules as it was. Secondly you could end up recruiting someone away from an already successful tier 5 raid, creating a farm team like scenario that caused so much bad blood between guilds. The best possible scenario was to pull a player away from a raid that had died, but this was a bit of a rarity at the time. Needless to say there was much cheering when the content gating systems went away in Wrath of the Lich King.

Must Be This Tall

While overall removing these raid based requirements was a good thing, as greatly simplified the care and feeding of raids, it did however introduce a lot of unplanned uncertainty. It was out of this uncertainty that things like Gearscore spawned. Gearscore was a concept of creating an overall quality rating for a player based on the gear they had acquired. The system was popular enough that with Cataclysm Blizzard introduced the iLevel system formally in your character sheet and began creating content gates based on this requirement. For example currently you have to at least be iLevel 480 or higher to be able to do a Heroic Scenario. The game keeps you from being able to queue for the content until you hit that magic number.

The problem is that the iLevel system of measurement is fundamentally flawed. Gear acquired tells a raid leader absolutely nothing about the overall play ability of the player. If you try hard enough you will be able to acquire gear regardless if you have the skill expected of that quality of gear. This is why you see players in Siege of Orgrimmar LFR that are legitimately only doing 20,000 dps instead of the 75-100k dps you would expect from the 496 iLevel requirement. iLevel is easy, so it has stuck around but it does nothing to tell you what to expect from a player. As was proven in the past, skill is much more important than gear, and players who really know their class will always out perform those who don’t regardless of how much new shiny gear you throw at them.

WoW Needs the Gatekeeper

The problem at hand is that people that are building raids have no non-subjective means of determining if a player is ready for the content until they have actually taken them into the instance. You can drag underperforming players along, but you need to have players that are performing past the expectations of the content to be able to make that work. The single best content gating mechanic that I have seen in any game came from The Secret World. At the top of Agartha there was an encounter that is collectively known as The Gatekeeper. He stands as the gateway to the nightmare level dungeon content, that drops the best gear in the game.

He presents to the player three tests, one geared towards Tanks, another towards Healers and a final one towards DPS… which in my experience was the most difficult. Each of them is a test of personal accountability and that you can perform what will be expected of you in the nightmare level content. They are fairly brutal, especially coming from the overall easy Elite mode content before them, but they do in fact very accurately assess how well you will do in the Nightmare content. Back when my circle of friends keyed for Nightmare mode, we struggled a bit, but we were still able to compete based on the skills displayed by the test. Waren and I both prided ourselves for passing the dps trial, without switching gear and going after either the healer or tank trials that were seemingly a bit easier.

Essentially the trial was designed to make sure you could move out of things while still maintaining a certain level of dps on the boss. These are the basic skills that any dps player needs in a raid encounter. The player could retry the encounter over and over until they succeeded only then allowing them to move forward into the Nightmare content. I know personally it was exhilarating when I managed to beat the Gatekeeper. I am certain I tried it some 20-30 times before I finally landed upon the way that I finally beat him. Sure there were guides to doing it easier, but the players till had to execute well enough to be able to get through the encounter. If you stepped in anything, you died instantly. If you allowed an add to catch you, you died instantly. If you failed to interrupt something, you died instantly. Finally if you failed to maintain a certain level of damage… you also died instantly.

Personal Endorsements

Once upon a time, in another life I was once a Boy Scout camp counselor. One of the things that happened every year during that first week before the kids arrived was that each and every counselor had their First Aid, CPR and Swimming Lifesaver certifications renewed. In each case it involved some sort of skills assessment, the Swimming Lifesaver being the worst of these. However each and every one of us passed it, and while we were cheered on by the rest of the staff each was a personal trial that we faced alone. I feel like raiding should be gated by some sort of non-subjective skills assessment similar to this. It sucks being the one to tell a player that they just are not good enough to be able to do the content. Without hard facts as to why, it often feels like the leader is playing favorites or simply singling a player out unjustly.

World of Warcraft has already created a system similar to this in the Proving Grounds. The problem is these are optional encounters and most players either don’t know they exist or since they are not required for anything… they never actually go through them. I myself have never done them, because they were not required for me and did not reward anything meaningful. If they took this concept and somehow integrated it into creating a ladder to climb towards raiding, it would be extremely beneficial in the long run. That has always been the problem with raiding in general, there is a nice clean linear path to climb to get from level 1 to 90. However once you enter the endgame all this player guidance goes away.

The iLevel system tells the player that having the gear is enough, however in reality we all know that success in raiding is about so much more than just gear. Having a similar endgame ladder to climb that even rewards pieces of gear to help the player progress would make what happens after you cap, so much clearer. Additionally having one of these Gatekeeper like encounters that controls entry to the new content provides a very clear “you must be this tall” sign that players that strive for. Sure it sucks because it introduces a “keying” process again, but in this case it would be one of personal responsibility, not of raid responsibility. Additionally it would give those really good but also very timid players a boost of confidence if they knew that beating this solo encounter… where there is no one to judge them… means they will do just find in the larger group setting.

Even When Bad, Its Good

January 5, 2014 by Belghast

Misplaced Weather

It is currently in the teens here in the Tulsa area, and the wind-chill is pushing it into the single digits and in some places negative numbers. Waking up this morning the entire world is covered in a blanket of white, albeit not a terribly thick blanket… but it is still coming down and shows no signs of stopping any time soon. Dear Canada, I believe you misplaced your weather. Can you please pick it up at the front office at your nearest convenience? A friend from twitter suggested that maybe Canada was not home and the weather was left with their nearest neighbor… which in that case seems to be the entire United States.

Here in Tulsa the weather is a nuisance more than anything else, primarily since my wife and I both head back tomorrow after a two week vacation. For us at least, knowing this was on the way we ran all of the errands we could think of yesterday so we could just hang out inside today in a blanket cocoon. I could go to the front door and take a picture of what is going on outside, but frankly I am just too damned lazy. I am wrapped up in two blankets and have a loudly purring cat on my chest… so yeah not moving. Hopefully the snow itself will not last terribly long, and so long as it sticks to just snow I figure we will be fine. It is always the ice storms that I am concerned about not the dustings of snow.

Had a Bad Day

Yesterday was a bit of a frustrating mess. Over the last several days I have been trying my best to make it through the Gates section of the Siege of Orgrimmar LFR on my Paladin. Since you cannot progress to the next step until you have beaten all of the bosses in the previous one, I found myself hung up there trying to get the last two bosses. Each and every group seemed to fall apart either during or directly before the Dark Shaman encounter. Over the course of the last few days since Tuesday I have been in no less than 8 Gates groups, and this yesterday morning it seemed for a moment like I would get through the raid finally.

We had made it up to Nazgrim but after one wipe the group completely disintegrated leaving me stranded with only needing the final boss. There are weeks that I cannot get the first bosses of a dungeon to save my life, however each and every one of the 8 attempts at Gates involved me starting over with the first encounter. I am not sure if I set them down hard, but after the extremely frustrating close call in LFR I got up from my cocoon and while pulling off my headset it completely snapped, leaving the right earcuff danging. The break was so close to the earcuff that I don’t think I could even attempt to bandage it along for a bit with duct tape.

It seems like I am extremely rough on headsets, as in the years of playing World of Warcraft I have gone through no less than eight that I can recall. No single headset has lasted more than two years before either falling apart on me or starting to malfunction somehow. Right now I am back to using a Logitech behind the head headset, but it itself has an issue with the left earcuff cutting out constantly and is only serving to infuriate me more. Granted these are all first world problems… and I should simply be thankful that I can replace the headset at my leisure rather than having to wait to do so. In fact as of writing this article I have already ordered a replacement. I am going back to an older plantronics design that previously I had gotten 2 years out of, which is pretty much the most I can hope for.

Even When Bad, Its Good

People are constantly down on LFR because it represents the absolute worst of humanity. The thing is… even at its worst I greatly appreciate its existence. I tend to be an altaholic, at present count I have 6 characters at 90 and a large number of characters within range of getting there. I have already begun raising my Discipline Priest Belglorian and within in the next few weeks it will likely join the ranks. I get frustrated in these games when I can no longer progress my characters, and because of the structure of traditional raiding, this generally meant that I got to progress whatever my main was…. but no one else. I have enough time to deal with carving out a block of time in my schedule for one stable raid group, but not multiple raid groups.

What LFR gives me is the ability to keep moving forward on all of my characters at my own leisure. I don’t expect a lot from the process, and I don’t expect the players in LFR to be marginally functional. I find it that I can compartmentalize LFR so that I only focus on my own role and ignore the fact that Rome is burning down around my shoulders. In doing so this means each and every one of my alts can at least achieve a certain level of gear. Granted I am not expecting them to be amazing, but I can keep moving slowly forward on all fronts… keeping me engaged in each character. Now even with this on demand raiding, I still personally don’t have time to run every character through. However I can get enough piecemeal progression to make me happy.

It is almost as though LFR was invented for someone like me, that likes to dabble in a lot of different things, but doesn’t so much care anymore about reaching the ultimate progression in any of them. So while I might complain about LFR, and get supremely frustrated at times… I am still very much thankful it exists. Despite all of the frustrations and set backs, it eventually goes just fine. Last night about 11 pm I finally managed to get a Gates group that was sitting on Nazgrim… the only boss I was missing. After a wipe we got the determination buff and came back and beat him on the second attempt. After all of the wait and all of the gold bags… I managed to pull the best possible drop I could hope for in the instances. My paladin is now the proud owner of Gar’tok, Strength of the Faithful and one step closer to being as well geared as I can get him.

Wrong Answer to Right Question

January 4, 2014 by Belghast

Morning Sucks

I have consumed my tasty oatmeal and my first cup of coffee for the morning, and I feel no more prepared to confront the day than when I started. For the last two days we have been setting a self imposed 7 am alarm in the hopes of trying to retrain our bodies to get up at a decent hour and hopefully go to sleep at a decent hour. While the 2-3 am slumber time has turned into a bit after midnight, getting up in the morning still seems no easier. I keep wondering if rather than Monday morning sucking… I have just allowed the last three days of vacation to suck equally. The adult inside of me realizes that this is all for the best, but the inner 13 year old wants to rage against the machine and go back to bed.

I had a pretty active day yesterday, which I assumed would make it easier to sleep. Instead it just seemed to make every inch of my body ache. We continued our junking madness this time discovering an entire downtown area filled with nothing but antique malls. That is a bit of an over exaggeration as there were a few businesses in there that were not, but basically it was three blocks of antiques. I am probably going to save the trove of pictures for tomorrow as I have an actual thing to talk about today. We did however crawl the entirety of the antiques district and found some potential options, and I got lots of random photos of interesting stuff to pad an entire themed blog post.

Disker Redux

I wanted to take a few minutes out of my planned schedule to update my readers on the whole Disker trojan issue from yesterday. Apparently it has been confirmed that the Trojan is being spread by a fake version of the curse client. How are people getting the fake version? More than likely this is yet another case of Google poisoning, with an illegitimate link getting higher ranking over the legitimate one. Basically as always if you actually know the address of the website you are trying to reach, you might want to go ahead and type the fully qualified URL in your address bar instead of relying on Google to get you there. This has happened in the past with sites like Facebook suddenly redirecting users to a completely different place or at best an article ABOUT Facebook.

When I see one of my family members using a Google search as their address bar, firstly I die a little inside, but secondly I try my best to correct the behavior. Each time you enter a phrase into Google you should take the few moments to verify that the URL it is sending you to is in fact a legitimate looking one. If you go to a site frequently… create a bookmark rather than relying on Google search as a bookmarking system for you. Criminals rely on the users laziness to carry off these nefarious schemes, and a little bit of diligence on your part goes a long ways to keeping you and your accounts safe. If a domain name doesn’t look right, don’t use it. At the very least do some research before using it.

Wrong Answer to Right Question

Now for the topic I had actually wanted to talk about this morning, and the reason why you are not getting a massive flood of junking photos. This is a bit of a spinoff topic as it started for me on the AlternativeChat blog. She herself was reporting on a Morning Topic from WoWInsider asking just how much players would be willing to pay for a boost to level 90. Surprisingly the most chosen answer is “Nothing, I wouldn’t want this option to exist.”. For the sake of transparency I myself also chose this option. In part I am not sure I want to live in a world of warcraft where nothing before level 90 actually mattered any more. Right or wrong the decision to allow boosts to 90 that can be purchased off the store is essentially telling the player base just this. Nothing that happened in the past decade actually matters.

Don’t get me wrong… I will happily accept the free level 90 that is reported to come with the expansion. As you can see from the image above I already have 6 90s, and several that are in close range of getting there as well. However if you look all the way at the bottom you see Belglaive my mage (which may or may not get re-rolled before I actually take the character seriously). The mage is pretty much the exact opposite of the type of character I like to play. I enjoy Sturdy and Melee, and the mage is neither. The only reason why I have a priest of significant level is because I accepted a scroll of resurrection and chose to boost that character to 80 in the process. Similarly the only way I am likely to get a mage to the level cap is with the free boost that comes with Warlords of Draenor.

That aside I think “boosting” is the wrong answer to the right question. The right question to ask is how can I get friends playing together faster. Blizzard seems to be choosing the option of being able to jumpstart the character to 90 so they are within 10 levels of their friends. This however is a pandora’s box of issues waiting to be opened. Firstly you are throwing a player into a character at the end of their life and expecting them to play catch up on learning the abilities. Despite the problems with pacing and out-leveling content, one of the great things Cataclysm gave us was a slow and steady introduction to the key character abilities as you leveled from 1 to 60 and beyond. By the time a character reached 60, the old world cap they had been spoon fed new abilities so that they could assimilate them at their leisure into their own hand crafted rotations.

Throwing a player at a level 90 character is essentially telling them that they should go to Noxxic or Icy-Veins and copy down the rotations that are listed there. While I greatly appreciate that each site exists, because I don’t care about the math behind my character… it does not really create fun and engaging gameplay. It seems so much more engaging and a better introducing to the game world to learn those same abilities slowly over time. Additionally I hate the idea that nothing I have done for the last 10 years of playing WoW has mattered. There are so many amazing places out in the world that this new crop of players will never likely see, and unique encounters they will never experience.

The Right Answer

By allowing for the boosting of characters to 90 you are basically robbing them of experiencing the World of Warcraft. Instead the game feels too much like an “end game is the only thing that matters” experience, which having played DAoC for years felt like a really hollow thing. I talked about my commentary being a “good natured rant” yesterday, and that really is my intent. For once I have no doubt at all that Blizzard has their heart in the right place. They asked the right question, how can we make it easier for new players to play with their friends. That is absolutely the question they should be asking, because despite the rough edges it is the community of players assembled, and more importantly the friends playing the game that make World of Warcraft worth playing.

I just think they are taking the easy way out in essence by boosting players over the leveling hump. The better choice, the choice that works well in every game I have played with the feature… is to add a rich mentoring system. This allows for mentor players to drop down to the younger players levels and experience the content the way it was meant to be experienced. There is no glory in facerolling a dungeon for a friend, just so they can get some quest completed. As a tank I have done this so many times, because I can pretty easily solo old content. During the Christmas break I took a friend into Blackrock Caverns so she could get the Christmas hat. While I was happy to do it for her, the experience was not exciting at all for either of us because I simply pulled everything as fast as I could and watched it evaporate around me.

If I could have dropped my level to hers, and gathered up a few more guild members to run that dungeon like it was meant to be run, I would have done so in a heartbeat. I love soloing old content, so I am not saying that there is anything at all wrong with that. However everyone should be able to experience the older dungeons the way we all did when we were at level. All players should be able to experience the severe trauma that comes with someone clicking too many candles in Blackfathon Deep, or trying to get the Postmaster to spawn in Strathholme. Mentoring provides two things, firstly it lets new players get in and experience some content with their friends characters. Secondly it lets the grizzled veteran experience those old glories through new eyes by seeing the content again with their friends.

There have been many times in the past that I thought they were primed to introduce a mentor system. When they made spell levels scale to the character rather than basing them on ranks… I felt this was the key step needed to catapult us towards a rich mentoring system. However for whatever reason one has not materialized and again with the talk of Warlords of Draenor I have seen no mention of this system. This is the correct way to let players experience content with their friends, without completely invalidating everything that came before level 90. I am not as opposed to having a single character boost to 90, but if this becomes a “priced to own” service that ramifications will likely be just as negative for the community as the dungeon finder has been.