If you read my Noblegarden post, you well know the fact that I do not much enjoy holidays in the World of Warcraft, however being the loot-whore I am…  I feel compelled to do them in order to get the Violet Proto-Drake.  So when a holiday event comes up that involves a PVP component, the Argent Dawn server as a whole shudders.  While Argent Dawn has a few notable pvp organizers (tower), we are without a doubt the biggest blue stain on the Ruin battlegroup. 

During BC our players PVP’d for one reason and one reason alone…  welfare epics.  I freely admit to doing this myself in order to get my healadin a solid healing mace.  However when it comes to successful PVP, as a whole our server does every single thing that makes non-pvpers annoying.  Knowing this, we started over the last week trying to plot out best to help each other get our PVP achievements out of the way. 

We tackled things as a guild, trying to get 4-5 players in each battleground helping run cover for whoever was getting the achievements.  This for the most part was successful… however Blizzard single handedly brought every battleground to its knees this weekend, making play almost impossible for the cacophony of frustrated players actually trying to enjoy this aspect of the game.

It’s a hard-knock life

The villain of the weekend was the meta achievement, School of Hard Knocks.  While I do not oppose the notion of having PVP components to world events, I do however oppose the fact that often times Blizzard doesn’t take into account the effects of a wide reaching achievement like this will have on normal game play.  In each case the achievement led to bad habits in the battlegrounds making it hard for the game to actually progress.  I’m going to take a few minutes to go over each battleground achievement and how it leads to bad game play habits.

Capture the Flag in Eye of the Storm

As the subheading states the achievement in EoTS was to capture a flag and run it back to one of the bases your team held.  There are two major issues with this achievement.  For starters it was in fact EoTS weekend, meaning all the actual honor farmers were out and active.  The second issue is the fact that as soon as the game started every single player vying for the flag ran to the middle trying to capture it.

This behavior allowed the honor farmers to easily run around and capture at least 3 of the 4 objectives making it nearly impossible to run that precious flag anywhere capable of capturing it.  We were finally able to offset this however by running a group of us to one of the objectives in order to hold it, while a chosen member of the guild waited to pick the flag up and run it safely to us. 

I personally however did not get my achievement until Saturday morning.  The early morning crew tends to be populated with Aussies, who in general are more PVP oriented on Argent Dawn and as a result were actually playing to win.  Being a protection warrior, I was actually a good choice for running the flag and was allowed to do so rather easily.  However if you are trying to do this one during primetime, bring a group of 5 players.  Have 3 hold the objective, and one guard the player currently running the flag.  With any luck the rest of the BG will catch on and help in the process.

Assault a Flag in Arathi Basin

Of the meta-achievements this is probably the easiest, and the only one that actually somewhat reinforces successful strategy.  Traditionally in Arathi Basin you have a roving squad of players alliance side that rolls from flag to flag never guarding anything.  This is for some reason the default mode that Alliance exist in, the zerg.

While there were still plenty of players zerging flags, the majority of players did fruitful things like guarding heavy horde targets like Farm and Blacksmith.  These objectives naturally have high turnovers, so within a few minutes we were able to get the meta on our entire party.  Unlike most players when we got the meta, we tended to start “playing to win” which helped out the battleground as a whole.

So my suggestions here for alliance players is once more to bring a group in with you.  Stick to attacking high turnover targets like Farm and Blacksmith, or as a Horde player go after Lumber mill and Stables.  Designate one player to cap at each time, and the rest of the party go on defense while the player caps.

Assault a tower in Alterac Valley

For me this was another simple one to get, but it proved hard for some of our guild mates without a firm knowledge of the Alterac Valley map.  In the old world, this was THE battleground to play if you were alliance.  It was the only one we traditionally won, and as a result almost all of my raid buddies… myself included spent our time in game waiting in its queue.  As a result I know how to rush the relief hut with the best of them.

I spent a good deal of the weekend suffering from disconnects every 30 minutes (which lead to a fun time in ulduar), this however for AV was a good thing.  On one of my disconnects I ended up logging back in near Galv, with that tower untaken and no one guarding it.  I simply jaunted to the top and got my achievement in moments.  For the bulk of our guild this was not the case.

The AV game became a zerg rush to the nearest towers attempting to capture them.  For our two rogues participating this was childsplay.  Simply keep up with the pack on mounts and then when hitting the tower sprinting up to get the flag cap.  For our priest this was more than a bit difficult.  She finally got the achievement I believe by forcing her way to frost wolf and going after one of the towers there.  The first two towers were always contested all weekend long. 

As a side note, this is the first time I have ever heard players curse you for attacking and taking down Drek quickly.  Sadly this one is all about connection speed, reflexes, and luck.  I wish I could say that going in as a team would serve any kind of boon to players, but in truth it comes down to either lucking out and retaking a horde defended tower like I did, or being quick on the draw and simply beating the unwashed masses to the top.

Return a fallen flag in Warsong Gulch

WSG, oh how I hate thee.  This battleground has without fail been my least favorite since inception.  With the achievement in play, it got worse.  The end result is that all 10 players hang out near the flag in the rare hopes of a horde trying to take it.  For the poor horde attempting, it means near certain death.  Of all of the battlegrounds WSG became the LEAST playable this weekend.  Getting the achievement became a brutal game of the “quickest fingers win” loot system.

Now comes the time for glaring stereotypes children.  In the ruin battleground, as a whole the Horde are FAR more pvp oriented than the alliance.  As such if you start capturing flags you will drag out an all out assault on the alliance base, it becomes a pride issue.  From what I could see, the best strategy here was a good frontal offense.  Build a good flag capture team and start running it.  After a capture or two you will have beat the horde players into a frothing mess, causing them to blindly strike at your flag to “catch up”.

When the “waaagh” takes hold, simply return to defense and pray your nimble fingers and beat the other players to the flag.  For the horde, I pray for you.  The alliance seem all to happy to stay inside our comfy base and camp the podium.  Getting the alliance to even attempt taking your flag has to be a feat in itself.  Whereas EoTS was the alliance bottleneck, I am sure WSG becomes the Horde Bottleneck in this event.

“School”s Out Forever!

After a night of frustration I am done with yet another world event… forever.  It was however entertaining to hear, someone who is without a doubt our most calm and collected member turn into a frothing f-bomb dropping mess within the course of an evening of PVP.  In truth this title came far easier than i expected.  I am not sure if it was the fact that we organized ahead of time to knock out what we all believed to be the bottleneck or the fact that other than the PVP requirement the rest of them simply took a little time (or money for the food).

I loathed Noblegarden with a deep dark passion, but all in all Childrens Week was like a flu shot.  Slightly painful, but over quickly and easily forgotten.  I do think however when blizzard approaches PVP objectives, they need to seriously consider what type of impact their achievements have on players who simply want to get into a battleground and PVP for real.  The meta-achievements themselves lead players to play in a fashion that was not entire conducive to winning.  That tells me, that the meta-achievements themselves were poorly designed.

Suggestions for next year

If the blizzard designers took a few simple tweaks I feel it would make the achievements more successful.  I am leaving Arathi Basin out of it, since that one already works well for the way the battleground is played.

• Capture and Objective or Flag in Eye of the Storm

This tweak allows players to actually take and hold objectives to get the achievement OR run the flag.  I feel this has two benefits.  Firstly it does not adversely effect gameplay, as it reinforces both taking and holding bases and capturing the flags.  Secondly it means that players who are not in the BG to win can completely their objective quickly and leave the game up to the players who actually care.

• Assault or Defend an Objective in Alterac Valley

Opening this up to multiple objectives means that players can continue to play the map like they normally would allowing objects like graveyards, relief hut, and towers to count for the objective instead of just the towers means fewer players would zerg certain areas of the map.  Life goes on like normal for people actually trying to win the map.  You would still end up with contention over certain targets, but it would however give players a reason to actually stay on the defense trying to slow the opposing side’s progression.

• Capture or Return a Flag in Warsong Gulch

This tweak allows players to ACTUALLY play the game and still get the achievement.  You would get equal credit for a good offense as a good defense.  This keeps in the theme that the meta-achievement should not cripple a battleground.

A few tweaks like this, and this holiday event will no longer be the painful pox on your small but dedicated PVP community.

Last night Duranub had our second outing in Ulduar.  It was one of those nights with tons of things going wrong out of the officers control.  Pulling together the raid was a bit less than easy, with more than a few of our solid core members having to be gone for various valid reasons.  Next we received command performances from a few of our most heinous serial AFKers with zero options to simply replace them and be done with it.  In addition to all of this, my connection was completely unstable causing  me, the main tank, to disconnect in the middle of a couple of solid razorscale attempts. 

All of these issues aside we managed to still come in, tighten up the razorscale strategy and pull out our first kill in spite of having two tanks DC in the middle of it.  It turned out to be a very frustrating night in general but all of that aside we performed very well on the content we managed to attempt.

 

Shoulders of Misfortune – Bracers of the Broodmother – Remorse

After downing razor we moved in to Ignis putting in several attempts.  Towards the end of the night we seemed to be getting the rhythm of the fight down.  Sadly we ran out of time, but I believe that Tuesday we can tighten things up and with any bit of luck pull out our third boss kill.  I am still impressed with the difficulty, it seems to be the perfect balance.  I realize we have only been a few bosses into Ulduar, but I am greatly saddened by the news today that they appear to be nerfing by as much as half the damage taken from various effects within the zone.

I understand tuning encounters when they fall into the category of being “cheap”.  Meaning there are overpowering attacks that cannot be predicted or mitigated in any reasonable fashion other than praying for good luck.  However so far every fight I have seen in Ulduar appears to simply be a matter of learning the pattern of the fight, knowing how to adjust to each change, and then executing well. 

Dumbing down content due to player whining always disturbs me a bit.  Maybe they are looking at the numbers and seeing larger majorities of raids wiping over and over to content, but to me Ulduar seems tuned JUST fine.  What I do see however is players who have been lulled into a sense of complacency by the “lol-easy-mode” content that was Naxxramas.  Several raid groups I am friends with, each have a faction of players who just want to return to farming Naxx because Ulduar is ‘”too hard”. 

The best things in life, are the things that are earned.

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.