World of Warcraft Archives - Page 60 of 109

Seven and Three

April 3, 2015 by Belghast

A Good Friday

Today is a very excellent day… other than the fact that I am actually awake at this hour of the morning when I don’t really have to be. Without exposure to children to constantly remind me of an impending holiday, they tend to sneak up on me. So at the beginning of this week when a co-worker asked me which day we got off for Easter I completely blanked… and had a sudden rush of realization that it was in fact that time. So I had expected to have to work today, which is part of what makes it such a truly good Friday. As far as what I will be spending my day doing… well we already have a list of things that I need to accomplish. For example as soon as the tag office opens I will be venturing out to renew the tag on my jeep, and at the same time going to get a money order to pay taxes.

On top of this I also have planned to record two different podcasts today, which is going to make it an exceptionally busy day. During the time in between I plan on streaming some Darkest Dungeon, which for those who have not listened yet is our March AggroChat Game Club game. I have not played it at all yet, so I figured I would stream my first moments in the game today. This was actually my pick in the round robin system we set up, and mostly because I had heard so many of my friends playing it a few months back. I am not sure what to really expect other than the fact that it is a dungeon crawler RPG about mental illness. The real question will be just how quirky the game is versus how fun and playable it is. There are a lot of games out there with a quirky mechanic that is supposed to be the reason why you play the game. Micromanaging mental conditions is not necessarily enough of a mechanic to keep me engaged, so hopefully there is a lot of good monster slaying fun as well.

Seven and Three

My week has been pretty much consumed with posts about the Developer Appreciation Week, and at least part of today will be consumed with trying to collect posts about the DAW2015. But during the time in between I did quite a lot of raiding. This week is easily our single best week in World of Warcraft raiding. In total we managed to down seven normal mode bosses and three heroic mode bosses in Blackrock Foundry, including two first kills for us. To recap that is Gruul, Oregorger, Darmac, Ka’graz, Kromog, Thogar, Hans & Franz on Normal leaving us Blast Furnace, Iron Maidens and Blackhand. Then we repeated a kill of Heroic Hans & Franz and went on to take down Darmac and Gruul as well. We spent most of last night working on Heroic Oregorger, which was the source of several frustrations… namely because we were getting discombobulated on the order in which we need to pop the boxes on the second time. We would end up tanking him where he stood when the boxes went down a second time, meaning that our normal order was jacked up because that place how was full of piles of the crap that he drops on the ground.

Unfortunately with all of these boss kills, I still have yet to pick up a pair of pants. I am still to this day rocking 640 legs, and I am starting to get frustrated enough to dump the resources into crafting a set. Honestly I have had some pretty shitty luck loot wise for awhile now. I was hoping and praying that Gruul would drop me an upgraded sword, but alas nothing. The best upgrades I have gotten in awhile seem to be from the Garrison loot crates that I get I believe every two weeks. I did somehow manage to get two piece set bonus this week which is a positive. I am not sure if it has helped my dps at all however, since I still seem to be bringing up the rear of the pack dps wise. I am insane on AOE fights, but single target fights I fall to the bottom. I think that might just be what Gladiator dps looks like honestly. All in all it was a fun night, but once again last night we struggled with lack of healers. For a period of time it looked like we were not even going to raid at all. So to come through and manage to down Gruul I guess was quite a feat all things considered.

Alone in the Crowd

@AlternativeChat the biggest challenge I see about the WoW community, is that lots are playing, but few are truly joyful to be playing it

— ▪Bel▪Writes▪Things▪ (@belghast) April 2, 2015

I got into an interesting discussion yesterday with Alt that in truth all started from me misreading a tweet. In the tweet she asked what piece of advice would you give a new player starting Warcraft, the wording however lead me to quickly misread it as “Someone you know who has NEVER played Warcraft before wants to start a game from scratch. Give them ONE piece of advice.” To which I and apparently several other people replied to try FFXIV… because if I had a friend that had not played an MMO and was looking to get into them, that is now the game I would suggest they try playing. So I was being unintentionally contrarian because other responses to the question admittedly colored my own interpretation. This lead down an interesting path where we start talking about why I am frustrated with the World of Warcraft community. I said that I did not feel that most players feel “joy” in playing the game any longer, meaning that I think most people are playing the game because they have played the game for years and have one hell of a sense of inertia built up.

To which Alt drove down a course of discussion asking if the community even matters if you are mostly a Soloist. I had a pretty knee-jerk reaction of yes… community always matters, but upon sleeping on this question I still feel the same. There is this whole “butterfly effect” that happens in an online game. Even if you are going out of your way to avoid other players, you are being effected by them. You might wander through an area because the player density is less there, causing you to get into more battles along the way, than if you had followed the beaten path. Similarly it might take you twice as long to complete a quest because other players in the area are farming down and actively fighting you for the spawns. Essentially you are never alone when playing an online game, and even without you realizing it other players are imposing themselves upon your game time. My theory goes something like this… if you play a game with an excellent community these random encounters feel less imposing. In a game like Warcraft the systems are set up in a way that make you adversaries with every other player operating in the same space, fighting for the same resources. The Garrisons have created this bubble world where you no longer have to interact with other players, but that world is a hollow shell version of the larger world. I feel that games that create systems that allow players to share and collaborate instead of compete are more enjoyable experiences.

Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 2

April 1, 2015 by Belghast

Yesterday I kicked off my own versions of the Developer Appreciation Week with five companies and game teams that I greatly appreciate it. It seems like we are starting to get some traction because yesterday MMOGames.com independent of my own intervention ran a piece of what we are doing. I still hope to see more people join in the fun and talk about the development staff that they really appreciate it. I play a lot of games… so I have a lot of love to go around.

Blizzard – World of Warcraft Team

Last night was quite possibly my single best night in World of Warcraft raiding. After some sluggish weeks we strolled into Blackrock Foundry and cleared seven normal bosses, then popped out and took down two heroic bosses… one of which was our first kill. To make the night even more special we managed to one shot all of them. After riding that high last night, it is impossible to do a developer appreciation week post without talking about Blizzard. World of Warcraft has been the juggernaut in the room for so long that I can barely remember a time when they were not the clear market dominator. While I have some disappointments about Warlords of Draenor, I feel like they are legitimately trying to turn the franchise around after what felt like years of neglect. It feels very much like they have doubled down on this game, and at the end of the day I am still enjoying playing it with my friends. For a ten year old game to still maintain relevancy is a pretty mighty feat, so my hat is off to the Blizzard staff who have supported it throughout the years and made it this experience that we judge all other MMOs against. It has been the gold standard for good reason. Even if World of Warcraft is not your game, you have to marvel at the level of polish that they deliver when they roll out a new expansion.

Bioware – Star Wars the Old Republic Team

Star Wars the Old Republic and I have somewhat of a checkered past to be honest. I went into this game feeling like it was going to be the WoW Killer for myself and my friends, but ultimately we lasted the same three months that we normally do in this sort of game. When they chose to go free to play, I was frustrated by how insanely restrictive the system ended up being. All of this said… if you can some how push past all of the limited time loot boxes and free to play cludge… there is a great game there at its core. With the launch of SWTOR I tried something that I don’t normally do… I leveled as part of a dedicated duo with my friend Euron. I played a Jedi Guardian and he a Jedi Consular, and we participated in each others stories. The way those two tales interweave was something to behold, and while it felt a bit confining to always have to make sure you and your friend were on at exactly the same times… it was a leveling experience unlike no other. The thing that stands out about SWTOR is the story, and what ultimately killed the game for me was when I ran out of it. Now I know I have several expansions that I can go back and experience and I keep thinking that one day I will do precisely that. In the meantime I have fond memories of the time we were all obsessed with this game, and give massive props to the folks who built such engaging content… that we pulled some fourteen hours a day to get through it all.

Zenimax – The Elder Scrolls Online Team

Since Daggerfall I have been in love with the Elder Scrolls franchise. Each time a new one comes out I end up devoting hundreds of hours to playing it, but all the while I keep thinking… this experience would be more enjoyable with my friends. So when I found out that Elder Scrolls was in fact being made into an MMO I was completely over the moon about it. I was lucky enough to be in the first round of alpha testing, so ultimately I participated in this game for over a year before launching it. Unfortunately this was a bit of a double edged sword because I got to see some features that worked better in early versions of the game, as compared to later more minimalistic ones. When you test a game that long it skews your vision of what the game actually is. Elder Scrolls Online has some of the best story content I have experienced in any game, and there are a number of quest lines that stick out in my memory. The whole concept of being able to continue into another faction after you have finished yours was inspired. The problem is by the time I hit the Aldmeri content I had lost a lot of my steam, and our guild was suffering the traditional drop off in players. Now that the game has shifted to buy to play however I am able to experience this game again and realize just how great it actually is. A lot of the problems I had with it early on have been smoothed out, and the post 50 progression no longer feels quite so grindy. I really appreciate the staff that has been plugging away quietly on making this game a better place to be, and I look forward to playing it more in the coming months.

Trion Worlds – Trove Team

Trove is this quirky world building game that blends MMO combat, MOBA style character design, and Minecraft style exploration and construction. I was lucky enough to be including in the first round of alpha invites for trove, and it has been insane to watch this game evolve. What I love the most is the way the developers have been meshed with the community since day one. Instead of a traditional forum, they decided to open up the process with a reddit, in fact I think this is the first game I can ever recall doing that. In those first days the community was so amazing, because it was so tight knit. You would log in and get welcomed by people that might recognize your name from the Reddit, and there was rarely a time when a developer was not in game talking to players. As the game has progressed the community has gotten larger, and the rigors of development have degraded this closeness a small bit, but it is still very much a game that draws its inspiration from the players. While I don’t play it as much as I should, I have loved watching it evolve around me. It feels like the sort of game you get when you throw a bunch of seven year olds in a room and tell them to solve a problem. It is pure unbridled joy and imagination… and has been good for my jaded soul to see that a game like that can exist.

Riot Games – League of Legends Team

League of Legends is 100% not my type of game. In fact I might never have played it were it not at the suggestion of my friends. Actually I rarely ever play this game other than when a bunch of friends want to do so. That said the experience of playing with a team of friends is contagious. There are a lot of aspects about this game that are problematic for me, a huge one being the still very toxic community. That said I give the biggest credit I can possibly give to the character designers. What League has in spades is the personality that seems to be lacking from so many other MMOs. The characters in League of Legends have a life of their own, and they make you fall in love with them. I have joked for some time, that this isn’t actually a game, but a modern sticker album… because I seem to largely collect characters and skins rather than actually play with them. Each character is really a triumph of taking what are mostly remixed elements and making them feel fresh and new. I tend to stick to the characters I know and love however like Darius, Graves, WuKong and Garen. My favorite gameplay mode however will probably always be ARAM simply because no one expect you to know what you are doing, which is about perfect for me.

Disappointment in Draenor

March 27, 2015 by Belghast

Death of Dungeons

So yesterday I originally set out to write a post about World of Warcraft, and I am guessing this morning I will actually make good on that threat. Last night we raided Blackrock Foundry, and overall it was an enjoyable time. I managed to actually pick up a second piece of “tier” gear giving me the two piece set bonus. Unfortunately each of the pieces I swapped out was significantly higher level than the 670 normal gear level. For gladiator however I have a feeling that the two piece set is going to make the difference since it means the occasional free shield charge proc. I am still finding joy in playing with my friends while raiding, the problem is right now I am not finding much joy in anything else is World of Warcraft. As I said yesterday and a few other times… were I not actively raiding in this game I would probably be unsubscribed once more. There are a lot of reasons why Warlords of Draenor simply is not working out the same way as Pandaria did, and I thought I would take this mornings post to write about some of my frustrations.

Firstly the big one seems to be that Warlords destroyed the dungeon running culture. In my guild no one runs dungeons, at all. Largely because there is no real point to running them. What I mean by this is that through clearing Nagrand and mixing in a few crafted items you can get any alt ready to run LFR without having set foot in a single heroic. I’ve proven this on both my Deathknight and my Hunter, and if I bothered leveling another character to 100 chances are that is the path I would be taking as well. The gear gained through heroics just is not enough of a carrot to deal with the frustrations of running the dungeons. I ran the hell out of heroics on Belghast until the first wing of Highmaul LFR opened, and then never again other than the complete some of the Inn quests. I love running dungeons, but there has to be some reason to be running them… some reward waiting at the end of the frustration. The sad truth is that heroics are far harder than Highmaul LFR, so the risk versus reward equation is out of whack. Without the need to cap some token currency each week, we no longer have the incentive to keep running them with the guild.

Garrisons and Ashran

Garrisons have been this mixed bag, that in some ways I really like because it gives me my own private Stormwind that I can do my banking and trade skills in peace. Unfortunately that is also a double edged sword since no one is actually venturing out into the hub cities. We log into our Garrison, and live there until time for us to venture out into the world for raiding. The most social activity is when we invite other guild members into our Garrisons for the purpose of doing an invasion. This feature could have been something to bring players together rather than keep them apart. I feel like there is this missed opportunity where they should have connected the hub city to our Garrison, in that our garrison was like a “quarter” of the hub. This would mean that sure players would spend a lot of time in their Garrison but there would also be the incentive to pop out to the larger city for the resources they are lacking at home.

I also feel there was a massive missed opportunity for guilds in that there should have been another “quarter” that was a “guild garrison”. This would allow guilds to have some common goal to pull towards, bringing them closer and allowing this guild garrison to have better resources that could be shared by the entire guild. Instead we have our Ashran hub located in a PVP zone, that at least at the start you could not even queue for instances from. It is quite literally a town we all go to on Tuesday to collect our weekly raid tokens… and then never set foot in again. Compared to Shattrath, Dalaran, The Shrine, or even the revamped Orgrimmar and Stormwind… Ashran hub cities are abject failures. They don’t bring players together, and only serve as a jumping off point for pvpers waiting on the next match. The previous hubs have felt like these grand cities that had a personality of their own, and begged you to come explore them. Ashran just looks like a lazy camp hastily thrown together on the edge of a battlefield.

Disappointment in Draenor

There is a lot that Warlords does right, and I really did enjoy questing my way through the new content. The problem is there is a lot more that it seems to do wrong. Once upon a time World of Warcraft was this game that had something for many different play styles. While not all of them were as well supported as others, there were still many supported methods of play. The problem that I keep coming back to with Warlords of Draenor is that it feels like Blizzard thinks there are only two types of players now. The first are the raiders, and they are giving them plenty of loving this expansion with a mix of awesome flexible raiding modes and the super hardcore Mythic raiding. Blackrock Foundry is one of the best instances they have designed in a really long time, and Highmaul was this fun romp as well. The other type of player Blizzard seems to recognize… are the folks who wished they had the time and devotion to raid. For these players they have given them the current “tourist mode” LFR content, allowing them to collect shiny baubles, see the storyline and feel like they accomplished something once a week.

There are more than those players however trying to play the game. There once was a very rich and diverse crafting and harvesting ecosystem, and both were routes to both financial success and enjoyment. The problem is that Garrisons have essentially decimated this play style by replacing it with a daily login “facebook game”, where you flip a few switches every day and get candy as a result. Harvesting is now utterly meaningless because you can level and army of alts and receive far more resources in 15 minutes of logging in multiple characters than you can in three hours of serious farming. On top of this, since the majority of serious tradeskill items are linked to garrison resources it devalues their creation. Also placing a three item cap on the number of crafted items you can have, takes away the value of trying to craft a full set of anything. After the first few weeks I stopped doing my crafting cooldowns, because it didn’t really feel like there was any point to all of it. I was not building towards any larger goals, because I accomplished almost all of them within the first month. Now my time in World of Warcraft is largely spent around me logging Belghast in each morning, and each night to flip the switches and keep the Garrison humming… all for the promise of my next loot crate and potentially some upgrades to support my raiding habit. Which cause me to question why I am even logging in at all.

#WoW #Warlords #Draenor

Bel Propaganda

March 25, 2015 by Belghast

Guild Infrastructure

It has been an insane ride with our free company. It is like the floodgates have opened and folks are now recruiting themselves. More truthfully it seems that when someone gets a foothold in our free company, they tend to recruit their friends to join it as well. As a result some strange stuff is happening, like last night it was pointed out that apparently we are now ranked 15th on our realm and climbing as far as activity goes. That is apparently up from 70th on our realm… which is absolutely insane, needless to say we are a guild on the move apparently. What is awesome about this is just how damned friendly everyone is. Each time a new infusion of people join the guild there is so much happiness in guild chat, with everyone welcoming the new players. My biggest hope is that we can keep this general sense of joy going forward. What is even more awesome is just how many of the new people are perfectly comfortable hanging out with us on voice chat each night. We are now contemplating the very real possibility of being able to field multiple serious 8 man groups at the same time, which a few months ago would have seemed crazy.

As a result of all of this… Tam and I had a discussion yesterday in which we released we were getting far too large to not have any guild infrastructure. When it was just a handful of us that were in constant communication… it worked more or less to not have any semblance of a guild website. However now that we have all of these new people we are having to create something resembling a modern guild. When we came back in July I stubbed out a site on Anook but we never really populated it with anything. As of yesterday this is changing, and I hope that we can get the rest of our guild to sign up and join in the fun there. Largely I am choosing Anook, because a lot of people already have accounts there… and dealing with running a forum is a pain in the ass. Forum software is often one of the largest attack vectors on any site, and if you do not keep a rigorous schedule of constant updates… it is liable to get compromised. I simply don’t want that sort of liability any more, and since Anook offers a fairly robust forum, shared image galleries, an event calendar, and a nifty way to link guild streams together… it seemed like a really nice fit. Not to mention that Lonrem is amazing and has been willing to support damned near any hair brained scheme I have come up with. Folks have already started populating the shared image album, which is awesome.

Bel Propaganda

Another thing to come out of yesterday is something of a recruitment piece. Over the last several weeks I have been giving essentially the same talk to everyone that joins the free company. Not that I mind having this conversations, but I felt like I was spending a lot of time repeating myself just getting the most basic information out there. I got to thinking… if I could condense this talk into a single page I could create something easy to link to new people. It is by no way an attempt to stop questions, but more to give players that are new to our group a quick info dump about who we are and what we are like. After creating this I realized… that I also created a tool to let people entice their friends. So as such I thought I would offer up the link here this morning for any of my Free Company mates that might be reading. You can now go to belghast.com/grey101 and get a quick dump of a bunch of information about our free company and our basic guidelines. So when your buddies ask you about your free company, you now have a quick thing you can link them to explain further. I used it yesterday afternoon and so far people seem to dig it.

While on the topic of propaganda… I had to include the above photo that Rae sent me. She was feeling out of sorts on Monday night, and while the bulk of us were raiding Turn 9… it seems she was up to shenanigans in our housing zone. I am really not sure how this happened but apparently an impromptu pony parade occurred where everyone broke out their favorite pony mounts and rode around our housing zone. I absolutely love that this sort of thing happens. A large number of us idle in the housing zone when not doing anything, and we have developed this awesome community of players that do the same. The night we bought our house, we were welcomed by a bunch of neighbors from the houses around us and over time we have gotten to know several of them. It is awesome logging in and running to the market board, only to get /hugged several times along the way. Cactuar is a truly amazing place, and I am so happy that we apparently chose correctly when we rolled there over a year ago.

Heroic Hans and Franz

Trying to mix things up a bit, and get our folks upgrades… my Raid has been working on some of the Heroic encounters in Blackrock Foundry. Last week we made significant progress on the Hans and Franz encounter, and had some lessons learned that we took into this week. Namely two things really lead us to this victory. Firstly better awareness of who was getting the body slam attack, and for them to move out of the raid making sure the tank did not take the debuff. Secondly better self awareness in trying really hard not to get pinned down by the crushers as they came through. Last night we had some of the worst possible luck as far as RNG goes and the patterns we could potentially get. There is this one pattern that was killing me damned near every time because the boss would be in the center of the room… and the only free space on the far left edge. On the last few tries, including the one when we managed to down them… I started prioritizing my own survival to damage time spent on the boss and I feel like the rest of the raid did essentially the same thing.

We managed to pull out a fairly narrow victory, but I have a feeling that since we now believe we can do this fight… future attempts will be much smoother. From there we moved to work on Beastlord Darmac, and had a few heartbreaking attempts getting him within 2% on our best. That fight… is just madness on heroic with so much shit in the room being on fire during the later phases. There are several things we need to work on, but I feel like we CAN improve and potentially down them next week. Largely the spear maintenance needed to be better, both in folks moving so they do not get pinned and folks breaking out individuals who did get pinned. The amount of time you have is really tight, and this needs to be an all raid effort when someone is gets stuck. Secondly I feel like during the last phases we needed to move the boss more often, because the amount of flame surrounding him made it damned near impossible for melee to dps. If nothing else we made solid progress and I feel like with a bit of polish we can knock this one out as well.