World of Warcraft Archives - Page 106 of 108

A Guild Divided

December 2, 2013 by Belghast

Nostalgia Won

If I remember correctly the last time I wrote a real post before my Nano recess, I was talking about the upwelling of nostalgia brought on by playing Hearthstone. I fought valiantly to resist but before long I was staring at the account section of the battle.net page and renewing my subscription. I had put this off because really I assumed this decision would end in tears. The odd thing is so far it has not. I have been enjoying the hell out of playing, and have even resumed raiding a bit. I don’t want to jinx it by saying I am back, but so far it feels like at least a possibility.

One of the awesome things about coming back at the tail end of the expansion is that Blizzard tends to give players many different ways to catch up gear wise. I have spent a ton of time out on the Timeless Isle and have been collecting sets of level 90 heirloom gear for each of my alts I intend to level. Since coming back I have caught my Deathknight Main Belgrave and Druid Belgarou up a bit in gear, leveled my Shaman Tallow and Warrior Belghast to 90, and am within a stones throw of 90 on my paladin Exeter. There is part of me that wants to push as many toons to 90 as I can before the release of Warlords of Draenor.

I have to say despite all of the negativity flowing around it, I am really looking forward to the expansion. They said during Blizzcon that the majority of the content would work more like Timeless Isle, and that was pretty much music to my ears. I love the way the content on the isle works, and I can spend hours both there and on the Isle of Giants tearing about the mobs with Belgrave. I think my happy medium is a mix of quests to give me purpose, and then found objectives along the way to force me to stop and smell the roses. If they can strike a balance, I think the content will be just about perfect for me. Not to mention that Garrisons sound amazingly fun, like a mix between player housing and the crew skill system in SWTOR.

A Guild Divided

At the beginning of Cataclysm I got a serious case of wanderlust. I would like to think it was because Rift was so amazing, but in reality I think I just needed a break from WoW. At that point I had played it for almost eight years straight without significant pause. But the sad thing is, that while I played it for seven years, I have yet to play a single game since for more than seven months. When I wandered off so did a lot of other guild members who were feeling a similar drag on their time. The untold story however is the fact that the vast majority of the guild stayed in World of Warcraft and in spite of my recruitment to other ventures… seemingly thrived. In fact I would say that right now Stalwart WoW was experiencing a bit of a renaissance with folks coming back that have long been dormant.

You can say this is the “Blizzcon Bump” but it seems a bit different for some reason. On my server Argent Dawn, I am seeing people showing up on my friends list that had disappeared years before I left the game. Even seeing familiar names popping into channels that out of nostalgia I am still joining. As much as I wanted to deny the fact, World of Warcraft is still thriving at least in pockets of players that have kept the embers of the community burning brightly. In my absence Rylacus has done a phenomenal job of “not messing with things” as he puts it. He has always been one of my closest and most loyal friends, and as I have been gone he has simply tried to continue on with what he thought I would do. It seems to have worked, because on week nights we tend to have 20-30 or more people online and active in doing something.

The only problem is that this maintaining the status quo has only caused to further some divides that started back in Cataclysm. When I said “A Guild Divided” in the section heading, I was not referring to the nomad gamers and the wow loyalists… but instead a rift that was always there but has deepened in my time away. Essentially our guild right now is a tale of two raids, the haves and the have-nots essentially. One raid has thrived clearing content and racking up the loot, while the other has floundered struggling to fill. There has been no intended malice, but the lesser performing raid has lost a lot of its brighter members to the better performing raid as folks sought out the path of easier loot. As a result there is more than a bit of bitterness and bad blood that has developed towards the alpha team.

Cleansing the Way

In the past I had served as a bridge between the two worlds, a bit of a buffer to lower the frustrations and aggressions. Rylacus has tried hard to fill these shoes but he simply does not have the volume of playtime that I do. Now that I am back at least for a bit I am trying my best to bridge this rift and hopefully mend the way between. As a result I have started tanking for the lesser progressed raid, and it seems like I am the difference between failure and success. The first week we downed new content, and it seemed so easy that I had no idea it wasn’t already on farm. The other tank is amazing to work with, and I am adjusting rapidly to this whole new concept for me of “no main tank”.

Additionally I am trying to attend the events sponsored by the alpha team to build the social equity there. The “big kids” have been gracious enough to host an open flex raid night on Mondays and this is getting betters of both teams in the same space. It is a bit awkward at times, but so far I think it has been an overall positive experience. The flex gear will help bolster both raids. The holidays have taken a big chunk out of our schedules, but I am hoping this week we can return to normality. In a sort of serendipity… several of my blogger and twitter friends have characters on Argent Dawn or are rerolling there. Going to try and get as many of them as I can into the open raid nights.

When I had come back for Pandaria the guild felt wrong to me. No one talked, no one worked together… and I really did not know how to fix it. Now coming back things are just different. Guild chat is full of lively conversation. Folks seem happy, and willing to help one another. Stalwart had survived all these years on a shared spirit, a feeling that we were all working together towards a greater good. During Cataclysm it feels that this spirit lost its way as we absorbed so many of the smaller satellite guilds that made up our non-guild-based raiding alliance. It feels though that in the midst of all of this a strong community has evolved. Here is hoping that I can be a catalyst towards solidifying this community into something truly great. If nothing else, I have been remembered and I still very much feel loved by my WoW family.

Nostalgia Won

October 30, 2013 by Belghast

Crackception

That’s right… you are seeing the above image correctly. That is two in game npcs in World of Warcraft playing Hearthstone. The game that has caused such an upwelling of nostalgia… is being played in the game I am nostalgic about. I feel as though they are missing an amazing opportunity here however. If you could ACTUALLY play hearthstone inside of World of Warcraft, the same way you can play Legends of Norrath inside of Everquest 2… it would quickly become the ultimate piddling around waiting on someone experience. I can remember how amazingly popular the bejeweled and peggle became as pre-raid activities and those were just addons.

It would be amazing if they wove hearthstone into every aspect of the game. Peggle loot was a thing that existed, and while it took forever it was an extremely fun way to settle loot disputes. Would be equally cool if you could do something like that with hearthstone. However that would also be a sure fire way to derail the gameplay, but still an enjoyable one. I guess the hearthstone game board feels all the more enjoyable… when you see it in a three dimensional table top version in the above screenshot.

Nostalgia Won

The fact that you are now seeing fresh World of Warcraft shots on my blog means that I lost the battle with nostalgia. I caved last night and renewed my account for a month so I could get in and satiate the urge to play that has been brought on by hearthstone. I go into this knowing full well that this decision almost always ends up in tears of frustration, but I felt like it was something I needed to “get out of my system” nonetheless. I have to say… once I got past the extreme awkwardness of seeing people I had not seen in years, that the overall gameplay was rather enjoyable.

I spent some time piddling around Timeless Isle and managed to find a chest with some purple shoulders in it. Of course my friends immediately told me those were “not good”, but hell when I left the game I was still in blues. I did not manage to stick around for much raiding at all in Panda-land so anything I could get was a massive upgrade for me. I liked the concept of the timeless isle overall, the fact that you could get decent purple gear just by killing random stuff out in the world. Additionally apparently there are lots and lots of chest out there that have the random chance of dropping something that can turn into a piece of gear like I found.

Similarly I had quite a bit of fun leveling Belghast. For whatever reason post Wrath, Belghast has not really seen any action. Right before the release of Panda-land I managed to push him up to 85 only to stable him again. For whatever reason it feels somehow wrong to have Belghast NOT be at the level cap for an expansion. Even though I pretty much transitioned to playing my Deathknight in Wrath, I would like to see him at least hit the cap here. The game is always enjoyable when I still have quests to do, but once that slows down I am sure I will get bored with it yet again and wander off in another direction. I know for certain that I am not back fully, because even if I end up landing for awhile… I will be gone once again when Elder Scrolls Online comes out. Right now every game that is not ESO is just a placeholder.

Playing Dice with Humanity

October 26, 2013 by Belghast

Tribalism

Yesterday my friends were having a long drawn out conversation that started out about the current Roma controversies, wound its way through discussions of any insular society… and like always an hour or so later ended up landing in the game world. Namely discussion fell onto the concept that even within small groups, cliques and teams form and the number over players it takes before that happens. Based on the discussion we agreed that likely the smallest number that really starts to occur is around seven people.

So none of this so far has any real bearing on todays post… but throughout the conversation we started talking about the openness to new players. One of the things that disturbed me a bit, is that one of my friends said that I was most likely the least open to new players, or at least the most suspicious. This went against my own personal vision of myself, considering I am constant abducting people into my guilds on a regular basis. So as I explored this line of thought further, he said that mostly it was due to my views on PUGs.

No PUGs Allowed

While this is not necessarily the thing I would like people to think of when they think of me… my guild as a whole has known for years that if they want me to tank for them, my price is that we have a full group of known good players. Usually this means that they are folks from the guild, but I am also completely open to friends of the guild in these scenarios. Basically… I don’t want to enter the group finder and play dice with humanity. The thing is… this did not used to be the case. I used to PUG players in a regular basis both in dungeons and even raids.

This got me thinking… what changed, why did I no longer even consider finding players outside of my monkey sphere to fill groups. I used to build groups on a nightly basis and even believe in it so much that I wrote a series of guides to covering the finer points of networking, communication and assembly of a winning PUG group. This was not something that was limited to WoW, but something I had done in many games previously. So I guess the question is… what changed to make me so fearful of the player base that I now refuse to pug even a single player into one of the groups I am responsible for.

Before the Dungeon Finder

Without too many leaps of logic I landed on the specific moment it changed… The Dungeon Finder. I have railed on the evils of the dungeon finder for years, but I don’t think I have really elaborated on that point enough. Essentially in the world before the dungeon finder I regularly relied upon social channels, trade chat, and other guilds to find folks to fill out my groups. I drew upon my friends list to fill the most basic elements. As a tank I knew that all I needed to do was find one of my many amazing healers that I worked with regularly, and then the dps could be filled out in short order.

The key point here is that with each player I talked to… I actually took the time to exchange a few lines of dialog with them before throwing them a group invite. It is amazing how much you can gauge about the personality, intentions and general character of a player from a few sentences. There was a very human element to this discourse, and over the years I developed and instinct about who would make for a good dungeon run by the way they presented themselves. To some extent I had learned to prune through the bad apples and seize upon the good ones only.

Additionally playing with players on your own server there was a bit of an honor code in the works. As the guild leader of one of the larger guilds on our server, I knew the leaders of most of the other guilds. So as a result if I had trouble with one of their players in a dungeon run, I knew precisely who to come to with those concerns. This lead most players to be on their best behavior, since there were potential social consequences of making an ass of yourself in public. Additionally I met a lot of really amazing people through this process, many of them that would end up in my guild or raid later on.

Playing Dice with Humanity

The Dungeon finder was the first blow to this world, but since we were dealing with mostly players from our own server… it wasn’t really that bad. I still regularly queued as a tank almost out of welfare to help the folks get those dungeon runs. I continued to still meet great players, and the bad ones were quickly added to my ignore list never to be seen again. However players complained, that the queues were still too long, and not enough tanks and healers were queuing. So as a result Blizzard started the cross server queuing madness and this was the nail in the coffin for me and pugging.

When there are no social consequences to ones actions… the worst possible behavior can be expected if not assumed. Periodically I would get convinced to queue with someone for a dungeon, and every single one of these occasions lead me to log out of the game frustrated and angry afterwards. I learned quickly that if you play dice with humanity, you are always going to loose. I met exactly ONE really awesome player through random groups, and that was only because the player happened to be on my own server. I didn’t really mind braving the bullshit as a DPS, but I refused to tank the instances any longer.

Rift Happened

So in a whole series of events I ended up leaving World of Warcraft, and entered a game without a dungeon finder system. It is funny how quickly I fell back into the old habits of building groups from social channels. Level 50 chat served as a launch pad for groups, and quickly within a few weeks time I had built up a long list of “known good players” that I could draw into dungeons. As a result we were filling out Elite groups on a nightly basis and happily clearing dungeons. I met enough people that there was even talk of merging in with another guild at one point… but we decided against it.

When the dungeon finder was released for Rift I watched the same events play out all over again. The social channels dried up, folks no longer responded to calls for groups in Level 50 chat… and everyone went back to the wow-like ways of relying on the dungeon finder to make a group for them. Additionally the community of the server as a whole suffered. The same old wow-like behaviors came back and the chorus of “PULL BIG” and “GO GO GO” returned as well. So once more.. I stopped grouping and resurrected a rampart around myself with a sign on it reading “No PUGs Allowed”.

From that point forward my rule as a whole has pretty much been… I will tank any dungeon you want me to tank, but you have to make sure we have a full guild group before we do it. I refuse to pug in any players that come from random dungeon finder systems. I would literally rather not do dungeons, than have to deal with the random chance of finding a decent person in the system. Most of the time this is not really a huge deal since I tend to bring a large group of people with me into whatever game we end up playing. However I am running a lot fewer dungeons than I would like to, and I am not sure how I can get past my phobia of strangers. So at the end of the day… after all of this… I guess I can see my friends point.

Yarn Chasing

October 25, 2013 by Belghast

Hearth Dailies

Last night I played quite a bit of Hearthstone, as I had allowed my quests to stack up on me. For those not familiar, there are daily quests you can do in hearthstone that earn you gold. The gold can then be spent on packs of cards. The quests tend to be things like “Destroy 40 Minions” or “Win 2 Games as Priest or Druid”. The first kind are easy to do and simply involve plugging at it until you have filled the requested amount of carnage, the later are more challenging since you actually have to beat players.

While I can fairly readily do this if I am playing the Warrior or Hunter decks, this is not so much the case with the other decks. Through the process of leveling each “class” to 10, you unlock various basic cards along the way that you can’t get any other way. The problem is, that while my Hunter is 15 and my Warrior 10… the rest of the classes are in the 1-5 range… which means they are missing significant weapons from their arsenal. Despite these constraints however I still managed to clear my quest log by winning 2 games as Priest, 2 as Rogue and 2 as a Shaman. The reward for what took an hour and a half to do… 2 new packs of cards and in the process a few more rares.

A New Whim

While playing Hearthstone I am still regularly suffering bouts of nostalgia, and while I am still resisting the urge to re-up World of Warcraft, I find myself craving that style of play. In a sequence of events that will not really make sense to anyone… I decided as I played Hearthstone that I would start the Allods client downloading. Allods has always felt like some weird soviet block steampunky WoW. I alpha and beta tested the game eons ago when it was rolling out, and remembered it fondly… to be truthful I likely would have played it were it not for at the time the extremely predatory cash shop.

It was an extremely fun place to run around, right up to the point that they introduced the cash shop in beta. It was then that I lost interested and moved on. However in the passing years I had heard that the cash shop was greatly relaxed, so I had filed it away as one of those games I wanted to revisit. Apparently last night was that night as I went through the process of retrieving my password on the account and rolled a brand new character on the free to play server.

Soviet Steampunk

A few weeks back I talked about the fact that I essentially make the same character in every single game I play. Since it was always the steampunk nature that appealed to me, I decided to go with the Empire faction instead of the generic fantasy “The League”. While gibberlings are seriously the coolest idea for a short race, I remember really liking the feel of the Empire better as a whole. So I attempted to create Belghast, which is always a human equivalent, always dark hair, and always a moustache and goatee. There was no racial option for black hair so I had to go dark reddish brown, and there was no option for a ponytail so I had to go with another option.

Without really meaning to I seem to have created “Lenin” with hair. While I felt the character creation options were limited, they were about as varied as WoW, so mostly viable. I ended up going with a Vanquisher, which based on the fact that it was sword and board… made me assume it was the tank. Upon playing it for a few minutes I noticed it had the standard protection warrior kit, along with an extremely long cool down charge and eventually a shield bash. The gameplay was fun but nothing really revolutionary, but then again I was not really expecting innovation.

Shocked and Amused

I have to say I was extremely pleasantly surprised by the experience. I found myself really enjoying the questing and gameplay as a whole. The world is far more intricate and beautiful than I had remembered, and filled with really great ambient music that instead of appearing out of nowhere… seems to come from in game speaker systems adding to the experience. I killed around two hours playing the game without really realizing it, and ultimately had to pull myself away from it to go to bed.

There is a lot to like in this game, and they seem to have reformed at least a bit their predatory cash shop ways. While you are leveling you get several freebie items from the cash shop in the form of chests that you can open every 5 minutes. Through these I got a number of cosmetic items and a 24 slot bag upgrade in additional to several vouchers for free cash shop items. I feel like this is a way to get you wanting the items from the cash shop, but overall I have gotten quite a bit of nifty stuff without paying a dime, and I am completely fine with that notion. If it ends up being a game I play quite often I have no problem at all supporting it, and likely will.

Yarn Chasing

The most bizarre thing of the night however was their guided waypoint system. For major quests they draw a series of massive glowing arrows along the map pointing out the path you should travel to get to your objective. However this system goes several steps past that and has put in an automated pathing system in order to get you to your destination. Out beside every quest in your quest log is a red ball icon, that invokes this giant bouncing ball of yarn. Your character begins to move of its own accord following the bouncing ball of yarn until you reach the destination. The whole experience is rather comical as your character willfully chases down this bouncing ball.

I get the impression that large blocks of the player base are playing this game as click to move… since that functionality is defaulted to on. It was rather shocking the first time I clicked a quest NPC and my character started running towards it. I turned that feature off since I have never been able to stack click to move control schemes, but it appears that the yarn ball movement system is still in place. While I don’t use it that often, I am finding it extremely helpful since the quest objective direction are usually unclear as is the mapping system as to where you are actually supposed to go to find things. Usually I can click the ball of yarn, to get it to show me the vague direction I should travel and them I am good to go. As a whole I was really surprised by just how much I enjoyed the game, and I look forward to playing again.