Irrelevent "everything can be expressed in WoW terms" thing that amused me.
For want of the rating, the dodge was lost. For want of a dodge, the tank was lost. For want of a tank, the attempt was lost. For want of an attempt, the lockout was lost. For want of a lockout, progression was lost. For want of progression, the raid group was lost. And all for want of the rating.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Roll Need [you idiot]
Here's an anecdote. At the weekend I did a lot of pugging on my Holy Pally to gear him up. Chime! Stonecore. Groan... I never have high expectations of Stonecore pugs, but then I noticed the other four in the group had matching guild tags, and that those matching players had several epics each. For the win.
When halfway through the run I am presented with a roll window containing a BoE Epic world drop worth approximately fifteen thousand gold on my realm, of course I wait to see how the others in the group roll, as I've learned too many times that rolling Greed early in a pug is the best way to get your loot Ninjad. So I wait. Twenty seconds pass without a word or a roll. Two people roll Greed, so far so good. The rest of us wait... the timer ticks down -- like a game of chicken. With seconds to go, the Warrior rolls Need. NOT ON MY WATCH. Needed! And it's mine.
"Ninja!" the party cried, knowing full well I had only followed the precedent set the by the Warrior before me -- the warrior who was their guild-mate. In fact I'm the one who should be outraged when he tried to ninja it. I quietly celebrated and prepared for the boss pull.
So what lesson can we learn from these shenanigans? [yes I like that word] The answer is: roll Need. You idiot. Ninjas exist, and playing by some made-up moral honor code in the wild anonymity of a pug is going to get you exploited. When everybody Needs, everybody is treated fairly. It's like the Prisoner's Dilemma but without any penalty for mutual defection. So please, save yourself some impotent outrage and just Need.
Now the only thing I have to figure out is if I was the last to roll and they did all Greed whether I would have then done the same. I suppose it's an interesting point in itself that in all the pugs I've done I've not yet had to make that decision...
When halfway through the run I am presented with a roll window containing a BoE Epic world drop worth approximately fifteen thousand gold on my realm, of course I wait to see how the others in the group roll, as I've learned too many times that rolling Greed early in a pug is the best way to get your loot Ninjad. So I wait. Twenty seconds pass without a word or a roll. Two people roll Greed, so far so good. The rest of us wait... the timer ticks down -- like a game of chicken. With seconds to go, the Warrior rolls Need. NOT ON MY WATCH. Needed! And it's mine.
"Ninja!" the party cried, knowing full well I had only followed the precedent set the by the Warrior before me -- the warrior who was their guild-mate. In fact I'm the one who should be outraged when he tried to ninja it. I quietly celebrated and prepared for the boss pull.
So what lesson can we learn from these shenanigans? [yes I like that word] The answer is: roll Need. You idiot. Ninjas exist, and playing by some made-up moral honor code in the wild anonymity of a pug is going to get you exploited. When everybody Needs, everybody is treated fairly. It's like the Prisoner's Dilemma but without any penalty for mutual defection. So please, save yourself some impotent outrage and just Need.
Now the only thing I have to figure out is if I was the last to roll and they did all Greed whether I would have then done the same. I suppose it's an interesting point in itself that in all the pugs I've done I've not yet had to make that decision...
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Enjoyment, burning out.
[I wrote this about a week ago, but for some reason didn't get around to posting it.]
The beginning of January saw me pretty burned out on WoW, having spent the previous month spamming levelling, professions, Heroics, archaeology as well as a healthy dedication to AH shenaningans. It was all terribly efficient, because that's just how I play, but of course that kind of play lead to the stage where I didn't even want to look at another Heroic, Archaeology hit some major DR for the hours spent doing it, and as more people maxed their profession skill the AH markets became increasingly crowded with competition and I suddenly found no motivation to spend any extra time re-undercutting after the third of fourth time I got 90% of my listings back in the mail.
So I stopped playing. Sometimes WoW seems like a very all-or-nothing game, you feel like you play WoW or other games. If you have any min-maxing tendancies you end up acutely conscious of the inefficiency in missing any daily activities, and it can be a hard thing for some people to let go of. I know this feeling well, which is why I promised myself never to "play" the game purely in the name of efficient progression whenever I realise I'm not enjoying it any more.
As a [suspiciously relevant] aside, I would like to highly recommend the downloadable title Super Meat Boy. I didn't much care for it at first, finding the character control too fiddly. But silly me for thinking keyboard controls would suffice -- I plugged in a quality digital gamepad and suddenly that game was like refined platforming gold. It's really hard to accurately describe the fun of that game without making a drug simile. I just makes my brain happy.
Another aside: fucking sigh at nobody else ever tanking. I love tanking, don't get me wrong, but it's frustrating that any time I want to heal, or heaven forbid DPS, I have to wait between ten and thirty minutes just to get into the game. I think we need some kind of weighted system to shorten the DPS queue for the people who have done well more than their share of carrying nubs. The prospect of 30 minute queues for Randoms was a major factor in my decision not to level my Warlock to 85 at this time, and it makes me very sad that my fellow players have created this situation.
But back on topic, almost immediately I can feel WoW sinking its hooks into me again, and suddenly there is no shortage of things I want to do in-game and so little time to do them all... my completionist Engineer finally has a chance to get those once-a-year Lunar Festival rocket schematics; I'm starting to enjoy Heroics on my Warrior again and have my sights set on a second piece of T11; and I got a taste of raiding on my Moonkin last night, which has motivated me to actually get some decent gear on him... which of course means I'll end up tanking a bunch of Heroics because I don't want to wait for the DPS queue.
If there's anything I regret, it's not investigating the Tol Barad craze back at the beginning, or better yet, when win trading was providing ridiculous levels of honour. And those welfare 359 trinkets are very tempting, assuming I don't get bored with the grind before I get them. =)
The beginning of January saw me pretty burned out on WoW, having spent the previous month spamming levelling, professions, Heroics, archaeology as well as a healthy dedication to AH shenaningans. It was all terribly efficient, because that's just how I play, but of course that kind of play lead to the stage where I didn't even want to look at another Heroic, Archaeology hit some major DR for the hours spent doing it, and as more people maxed their profession skill the AH markets became increasingly crowded with competition and I suddenly found no motivation to spend any extra time re-undercutting after the third of fourth time I got 90% of my listings back in the mail.
So I stopped playing. Sometimes WoW seems like a very all-or-nothing game, you feel like you play WoW or other games. If you have any min-maxing tendancies you end up acutely conscious of the inefficiency in missing any daily activities, and it can be a hard thing for some people to let go of. I know this feeling well, which is why I promised myself never to "play" the game purely in the name of efficient progression whenever I realise I'm not enjoying it any more.
As a [suspiciously relevant] aside, I would like to highly recommend the downloadable title Super Meat Boy. I didn't much care for it at first, finding the character control too fiddly. But silly me for thinking keyboard controls would suffice -- I plugged in a quality digital gamepad and suddenly that game was like refined platforming gold. It's really hard to accurately describe the fun of that game without making a drug simile. I just makes my brain happy.
Another aside: fucking sigh at nobody else ever tanking. I love tanking, don't get me wrong, but it's frustrating that any time I want to heal, or heaven forbid DPS, I have to wait between ten and thirty minutes just to get into the game. I think we need some kind of weighted system to shorten the DPS queue for the people who have done well more than their share of carrying nubs. The prospect of 30 minute queues for Randoms was a major factor in my decision not to level my Warlock to 85 at this time, and it makes me very sad that my fellow players have created this situation.
But back on topic, almost immediately I can feel WoW sinking its hooks into me again, and suddenly there is no shortage of things I want to do in-game and so little time to do them all... my completionist Engineer finally has a chance to get those once-a-year Lunar Festival rocket schematics; I'm starting to enjoy Heroics on my Warrior again and have my sights set on a second piece of T11; and I got a taste of raiding on my Moonkin last night, which has motivated me to actually get some decent gear on him... which of course means I'll end up tanking a bunch of Heroics because I don't want to wait for the DPS queue.
If there's anything I regret, it's not investigating the Tol Barad craze back at the beginning, or better yet, when win trading was providing ridiculous levels of honour. And those welfare 359 trinkets are very tempting, assuming I don't get bored with the grind before I get them. =)
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
PvC
It's nice to be raiding again. The challenge is back, and the fun is back.
Well, until you get to the Ascendant Council and suddenly it's your sole responsibility to interrupt 1.5 second casts while tanking. Which is a somewhat harsh to begin with, but you're doing it while dancing around to dodge all the other fight gimmicks. Which again, is challenging, but still manageable... assuming you live within ten-thousand kilometres of the server.
And Blizzard tells me their game is perfectly playable without a tunneling service...
I think 1.5 second interrupts are the best argument I have seen so far for Australian servers, or at the very least an official alternative to 3rd party tunneling. Typically, a 1.5 second cast will appear on my screen between 0.2 and 0.4 seconds into the cast, and my interrupt, once cast, will take another 0.2-0.4 seconds to register with the server. Again, this is with a tunneling service, and assumes nothing in between my box and the server suffers an unexpected hiccup.
The most aggravating thing I've ever experienced in WoW is nailing that button the moment the cast starts, watching the button press on my screen, and sitting there in slow-motion horror as the boss finishes and unleashes his insta-gib spell cast because my connection latency was too high at this moment to transmit this action to the server in time.
I'll be the first person to argue against removing challenging elements from video games, but the challenge needs to derive from the gameplay, not in peripheral things such as overcoming a poor control scheme or a terrible interface or arbitrary trial-and-error elements. And especially not from anything external to the game such as network latency. When latency can account for over 50% of my time-to-react gameplay element, the gameplay itself is degraded.
I might check to see whether anyone has brought this up on the official forums. It seems like an issue worthy of a response.
Well, until you get to the Ascendant Council and suddenly it's your sole responsibility to interrupt 1.5 second casts while tanking. Which is a somewhat harsh to begin with, but you're doing it while dancing around to dodge all the other fight gimmicks. Which again, is challenging, but still manageable... assuming you live within ten-thousand kilometres of the server.
And Blizzard tells me their game is perfectly playable without a tunneling service...
I think 1.5 second interrupts are the best argument I have seen so far for Australian servers, or at the very least an official alternative to 3rd party tunneling. Typically, a 1.5 second cast will appear on my screen between 0.2 and 0.4 seconds into the cast, and my interrupt, once cast, will take another 0.2-0.4 seconds to register with the server. Again, this is with a tunneling service, and assumes nothing in between my box and the server suffers an unexpected hiccup.
The most aggravating thing I've ever experienced in WoW is nailing that button the moment the cast starts, watching the button press on my screen, and sitting there in slow-motion horror as the boss finishes and unleashes his insta-gib spell cast because my connection latency was too high at this moment to transmit this action to the server in time.
I'll be the first person to argue against removing challenging elements from video games, but the challenge needs to derive from the gameplay, not in peripheral things such as overcoming a poor control scheme or a terrible interface or arbitrary trial-and-error elements. And especially not from anything external to the game such as network latency. When latency can account for over 50% of my time-to-react gameplay element, the gameplay itself is degraded.
I might check to see whether anyone has brought this up on the official forums. It seems like an issue worthy of a response.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
On bug fixes
I seriously wish Blizzard would hurry up and fix the Sandstone Drake. Currently the tooltip reads:
When actually this should read:
Sandstone Drake
1.5 sec cast
Transforms you into a Sandstone Drake, allowing you to fly very fast and carry an ally on your back.
When actually this should read:
Sandstone Drake
1.5 sec cast
Transforms you into a Sandstone Drake, allowing you to fly very fast and grants you sufficient telekinetic power to hold an ally in a sitting position in mid-air in front of you as you fly around.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
A fable on class diversity and class balance.
In the beginning, the developers created nine classes. Warriors were the tanks, Priests were the healers, Rogues were melee, Magi were casters.
The other five were hybrids, each designed with totally unique perks that contributed to group play and made up for their lack of a singular strength in tanking or healing or damage per second.
But one day a Paladin rose up and declared;
"OMGWTF Y CAN ROUGE DO MORE DPS THAN ME FFS IMBALANCEW"
despite the fact that he had eight times the armour, the ability to heal himself, raid buffs, raid utility and the strongest defensive cooldowns in the game.
More hybrids rose up, unsatisfied with their unique class benefits, to join the throng, and at last the developers realised that nobody cared how many defensive abilities or crowd controls or unique and powerful buffs they had. A benefit which cannot be measured cannot be boasted.
And so the developers declared that all classes would do equal damage, all healers would heal equal damage, and all tanks would take equal damage, since these were the only things that mattered.
And the hybrids rejoiced, for now the jack-of-all-trades could master each, and all classes would be equals-- little matter that they were somewhat more equal than the rest.
The other five were hybrids, each designed with totally unique perks that contributed to group play and made up for their lack of a singular strength in tanking or healing or damage per second.
But one day a Paladin rose up and declared;
"OMGWTF Y CAN ROUGE DO MORE DPS THAN ME FFS IMBALANCEW"
despite the fact that he had eight times the armour, the ability to heal himself, raid buffs, raid utility and the strongest defensive cooldowns in the game.
More hybrids rose up, unsatisfied with their unique class benefits, to join the throng, and at last the developers realised that nobody cared how many defensive abilities or crowd controls or unique and powerful buffs they had. A benefit which cannot be measured cannot be boasted.
And so the developers declared that all classes would do equal damage, all healers would heal equal damage, and all tanks would take equal damage, since these were the only things that mattered.
And the hybrids rejoiced, for now the jack-of-all-trades could master each, and all classes would be equals-- little matter that they were somewhat more equal than the rest.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Cataclysm, etc.
Eighty-five and ready to raid. Well, to be honest I was ready to raid three weeks ago, but apparently I'm in a guild full of noobs who don't even take time off work to play new expansions. The only raid content I've tasted so far was Baradin Hold, and while it was terribly exciting to step into a new encounter not fully understanding what to expect, the very comfortable one-shot was something of an anticlimax.
I'd anticipated a plethora of business opportunities in Cata and was not disappointed. I started the expansion still in debt [to the Significant Other] but quickly found myself back in the black and able to afford any and all perks I felt like acquiring.
Gems are an easy staple, cut them, list them at an undercut whenever you find a spare minute and roll the dice on whether the next competitor will undercut you before they sell. Repeat every 3-4 hours or whenever you find time -- your profit is fairly proportional to the frequency at which you relist.
Enchanters seem a bit broken at the moment. No, not the profession, the people. But who am I to complain about paying ~3g for an enchant which currently cost 2-300g in materials. I should probably stock up.
Engineering robots are selling well as always, and as always at a ridiculous profit margin. I wonder if I should be concerned at the prospect of non-proliferation treaties, what with all the Personal World Destroyers I've been proliferating...
I love Archaeology as a secondary profession. It's beautifully designed to be a perfect time-filler if you're just hanging out or a pleasant wind-down between more intense gameplay sessions.
Assuming, of course, that you're not one those people who misunderstand the purpose of a secondary profession and assume it's a guaranteed path to welfare epics. I've seen a couple of epic QQ threads on the forums. Nothing more amusing than a flailing idiot with a sense of entitlement, and there seem to be an awful lot of them.
As for me, I quite enjoyed the chance to see the world, though I did eventually end up hitting some serious DR as the attainable Rare artifacts dried up. I think I might wait until a few more artifacts are patched in before I push for Professor, as I neither feel myself lucky enough to expect another L85 BoA to land on my lap, nor do I feel compelled to spend any more hours choking on three layers of RNG for Nerubian or Tol'vir artifacts.
I'd anticipated a plethora of business opportunities in Cata and was not disappointed. I started the expansion still in debt [to the Significant Other] but quickly found myself back in the black and able to afford any and all perks I felt like acquiring.
Gems are an easy staple, cut them, list them at an undercut whenever you find a spare minute and roll the dice on whether the next competitor will undercut you before they sell. Repeat every 3-4 hours or whenever you find time -- your profit is fairly proportional to the frequency at which you relist.
Enchanters seem a bit broken at the moment. No, not the profession, the people. But who am I to complain about paying ~3g for an enchant which currently cost 2-300g in materials. I should probably stock up.
Engineering robots are selling well as always, and as always at a ridiculous profit margin. I wonder if I should be concerned at the prospect of non-proliferation treaties, what with all the Personal World Destroyers I've been proliferating...
I love Archaeology as a secondary profession. It's beautifully designed to be a perfect time-filler if you're just hanging out or a pleasant wind-down between more intense gameplay sessions.
Assuming, of course, that you're not one those people who misunderstand the purpose of a secondary profession and assume it's a guaranteed path to welfare epics. I've seen a couple of epic QQ threads on the forums. Nothing more amusing than a flailing idiot with a sense of entitlement, and there seem to be an awful lot of them.
As for me, I quite enjoyed the chance to see the world, though I did eventually end up hitting some serious DR as the attainable Rare artifacts dried up. I think I might wait until a few more artifacts are patched in before I push for Professor, as I neither feel myself lucky enough to expect another L85 BoA to land on my lap, nor do I feel compelled to spend any more hours choking on three layers of RNG for Nerubian or Tol'vir artifacts.
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