Rare mount get!

The thing that I think is funny is the number of mounts that I think are really ugly until I get one, and then I'm entranced by its strange beauty.

Aeonaxx

Time-Lost Proto Drake [as of last night]

Grey Riding Camel

I like to compare camping these things to something like SETI; you know they're out there, somewhere, in the overwhelming emptiness... all you have to do is listen for long enough. And then, eventually, it happens.

I have no interest in spending my time camping, so I've been using a low-level character on a second account. She is in-guild so I can summon Syrannia straight there as soon as NPC-scan goes off, and I have a timer on my desk to remind me to de-AFK her every 30 minutes. I tried a couple of times leaving it going overnight with an anti-AFK macro, but after literally twice having woken up to see the alarm had gone off hours before I decided I couldn't be arsed, so I ended up only camping while I was awake and actually at or near my PC.

Aeonaxx and TLPD took about two weeks each using this technique, with probably about 6-8 hours of AFK camping per day, and most importantly with virtually no impact to my own playtime or other activities.

I've been getting this overwhelming feeling recently of just being done with this expansion. I took up mount collecting maybe 10 months ago when I ran out of solo PvE progression, later dabbling a bit in collecting pets [which for the record is way, way easier than mounts], but both of those now seem to have run their respective courses. There are very few mounts left that are even possible to get solo, and with all pets being tradeable soon enough-- so I can just buy them instead of grinding for them-- I feel little compulsion to put actual effort into finding the few that I could get.


Raiding aside [still love raiding], I feel like I've wrung just about as much entertainment as I can out WoW as it currently exists. I'm ready for something new now. Though to be honest when I think about it too much I worry that I'll become bored even more quickly with Mists, because a so much of my gameplay recently has been the previous expansions' content which I just never did the first time around [or did on different characters] and now the I've cleared this "backlog" I'm looking solely at the new stuff for content.

I need to find me an RBG team. [No, not just for the mount... >_> Shut up.] I actually really enjoy WoW's PvP, but I get very tired of all the retards in public games.

epeen > goldsinks

Speaking of mounts, Blizzard caved yesterday to intense forum whining to make goldsink mounts account-wide. Because clearly this is something that players both need and deserve; clearly the fact that they're letting us use 98% of our mounts on multiple characters without having to earn them separately is an insult, Blizzard, an insult, unless we also get that last 2%.

I mean it made a lot of sense to me that they would be left off; the only barrier to obtaining them on any of your characters is easily grindable gold, so they're essentially already available on all your characters [you don't even need to earn it on the character in question]. Plus many people [myself included] have spent this gold multiple times on multiple characters for apparently no benefit, and while I myself can shrug off the wasting of an amount in the tens of thousands of gold without bitching about it, I'm sure there many, many players spent a long, long time working to earn those mounts on multiple characters. I can only assume the devs will end up adding some mechanic to make it up to these people.

In the end it's neither here nor there, really. I already bought all the goldsink mounts on my Warrior anyway, a second time in some cases. Yay I get to summon a Mammoth on my levelling toons. That would be a nice convenience if I spent much time levelling.

Just for god's sake don't deny players their rightful epeen. They will fight tooth and nail for that thing.

Actually if I've learned anything from this it's to wonder whether my views [as a player who doesn't hate everything] are not being properly represented if I'm not whining about what I deserve on the forums. I guess the flipside to that is that I worry if I actually read the forums I'd end up killing myself because god dammit those things are lose-faith-in-humanity depressing.

Too many mounts

Because like those who become rich and suddenly have an opinion on the capital gains tax, as a mount collector I feel like Blizzard has gone absolutely mount crazy in the Mists development.

The cynic in me is screaming that it makes so much fucking sense for them to put in more mounts, because everybody loves getting new mounts and it's probably a hell of a lot easier to design an awesome cool mount, re-skin it five or so times, and hide it behind a two-month grind; than it is to make another two months worth of gameplay, and the end result of each is the same; $30 more in Blizzard's pockets.


The optimist in me is quiet because he can't really see how it could be any other way.

Black Market

I suppose I have time today to write what's on my mind. Black Market AH is hotly debated between those who realise the positive effect it will have on the economy as a whole and those who hate it when other people get things.

It seems obvious to me that luxuries are something which are in short supply in the WoW economy. Gold tends to lose its value when you get past a few hundred thousand, and so the few luxury items that do exist tend to sell for stupid amounts as the buyers often don't have any use for the gold aside the few items that come along. And of course this huge sum of money existing in the economy without anything terribly useful to spend it on leads to inflation as enough players are wealthy enough to easily afford to drop huge sums of gold on the few things they want [like the latest BoEs or epic gems] without too much deliberation, leaving anyone who has not spent months building up a small fortune priced out of this part of the game.

Of course, as Theck pointed out on her blog [Theck is female, right?] luxuries and BiS Heroic raiding gear are two different things, the latter being something that provides a tangible advantage top tier raiding guilds, groups which are used to doing whatever is necessary to ensure every advantage is available to them, groups for whom it is fully within their capabilities to take control of a server's Auction House if they were given a reason to do so.

So I really hope that doesn't happen. All they have to do to fix it is restrict current tier items from dropping within the first couple of months of that tier.

A few people have brought up the idea that having more use for large sums of gold will stimulate business for gold sellers, which I can't necessarily disagree with, and I can only hope that having more opportunities to spend a spend large sum of money in one transaction will make tracking and punishing the buyers a lot simpler.

I'm really excited to see what this ends up looking like in the live game, and especially whether there will be a noticeable change in the relative pricing of things like BoEs and top tier gems.

Blizzard still sucks at planning

A few weeks ago Blizzard released a highly-anticipated game that millions of people have been waiting a decade to play, apparently without anyone at the company realising that millions of people would probably all try to play it at the same time.


In November 2010 I wrote about the then-upcoming Cataclysm expansion, having spent the last year in Icecrown citadel; "One expansion ever 12-14 months" is the long-stated intention and... I'm sure they're still working on that one."


Two years later, I'm sure they're still working on that one. 


I think it's a pretension all humans have to think they are capable of more than they are actually capable of.

A bit more on Diablo III

I posted this as a comment on another blog, but I thought it was a relevant enough point that I should copy it here.

I feel that Blizzard was extremely coy about revealing that this game doesn’t just require an Internet connection as a DRM and anti-hacking protection, it’s a game played completely online, with downtime and server queues and lag. For Australians who have to connect to a servers on another continent, that last point is a very big deal.

I played the beta for hours and somehow missed this fact until launch day. To be honest I do feel betrayed– I feel that I was mislead about the product that I was “purchasing” [I am an Annual Pass member]. Were this a disc product that I had bought in a store I could take it back for store credit, but as it was ostensibly free I guess all I can do is be very disappointed in Blizzard, and to be more careful about what exactly I’m buying next time they try to sell me something.

Diablo III

Like most of the games I talk about, you should assume that the fact that I’m writing about this game means that I enjoy it, even though all I seem to have is complaints.

The word that I keep coming back to is “disappointing.” It’s disappointing that Blizzard has made this product into an MMO in every way they could without actually having a persistent world. I understand why they did it, but for someone who has little to no interest in playing it as an MMO, all this means for me is that my game is laggy at best, disconnects me randomly and at times is completely unavailable for me to play.

I don’t believe that anybody asked for this to be an MMO. I’m sure Blizzard sees it as creating a better game for their players, but I have a hard time seeing any kind of majority willing to accept lag, disconnects and downtime as a trade-off for slightly easier grouping and the ability to break normal difficulty with AH gear.

It’s not a game mode that I necessarily have much interest in, but I’m told that Australians don’t play Hardcore mode. It's easy to understand why-- when your latency is around 200ms on a good day and lag spikes occur on top of that, you don’t even need to make a mistake to lose everything. Not my complaint, really, but another disppointing thing to hear; another facet of the gameplay severely affected by unnecessary MMO bullshit.

A higher difficulty should have been available from the start. Normal mode is about the equavalent of Raid Finder difficulty in WoW and forcing experienced players to play the entire game on easy before they can unlock a difficulty level which will actually challenge them is just pointless busy work. It’s like forcing WoW players to gear up in Raid Finder before they can fight any normal mode bosses.

I’m sure it was a very deliberate design decision to disallow players rebinding the left mouse button to anything other than “Primary attack/Move”. This restriction is something that as a player I find completely unnecessary, and as a long-time PC gamer is actually pretty insulting. Control is in my opinion the most important thing to not fuck up in any video game, and having ostensibly the two most important functions in the game occur contextually based on whether the game considers the space under my mouse pointer to be part of a monster’s hit box or not when I click the button is fucking retarded. Fucking. Retarded.

Yes, I get it, this is how the game is “meant” to be played... classic 90s game legacy and whatever, and I know you need to set the game up to make sure that the pants-on-head retards don’t flail around helplessly because they can’t figure out more than one button. Just let me remap my god damn controls in a way that makes sense to me, without having to resort to going into my mouse drivers to remap the god damn mouse buttons themselves just to get around the broken-ness of your compulsory default control scheme. Also, stop pretending that buff spells can’t work on mouse buttons. Now you’re just being difficult.

Oh, but one thing I was impressed with: Brillant simple design in which melee classes just take 30% less damage as a tradeoff for needing to be in the place where the damage is happening. Perfect. Love it. Would love to see it in WoW, except that it probably couldn’t be balanced at endgame-- we’d see the hardcore raid teams swapping their entire melee/ranged roster between bosses and that would make the retards on the forums whinge that the top guilds use anything but a perfect balance of classes. THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.

Oh wow that was neat. I took something I liked and found a way to complain about it.

-blink-

Actually I’m not sure how to feel about that.