This weekend I'll be raiding the real world, so there won't be any posts from me. I did speak to Nim however who said she might come by and drop in a few words :)
For those of you who are curious. I will be going to Castlefest. A yearly medieval festival with song and dance, looking forward to it ^_^
Better get packing!
Oh...in other news. Thanks to all you guys this blog has had over 10.000 hits. Started in March and it didn't go skyhigh immediately, but steadily more people joined, and hey still going strong and still here. So a big thank you to the readers ^_^
Hasta!
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
PVP vs PVE
Several nerves and buffs are going out again for patch 3.2. And several nerfs are once again trying to balance PVP versus PVE. I know my class is being nerfed because of PVP, not because of PVE. But the change does hit both playstyles.
Every time I read this sort of stuff I wonder if there's not a better way. I mean there must be a way to separate PVP balance from PVE balance. Because it seems to be impossible to balance all of it. And to be frank, balancing for PVP seems a lot harder anyway, since players will just sit there for hours on end and figure out how to fight against every other class. There's no way Blizzard can do this much testing internally. So the end result becomes that half the balancing are reactions to the testing done by players inside the game.
With the dual spec in, I wonder if players should be given compeltely separate PVP talent trees. This would not be your normal talent trees. It would be a completely new combination of talents specifically designed and only usable in PVP (or while PVP flagged).
You would switch to these talents in PVP situations (or on PVP servers this would be your main) and it would be balanced completely differently than the PVE talent trees. To go with what I know best. In the PVE talents you would for example be able to take casting time off penance, whereas in your PVP talents you're simply not given the option to take that talent.
When stepping into a raid, or not being flagged in any way you would work with the PVE talents that you can take.
It would of course still require the base talents to be the same, but by forcing the use of specifically balanced PVP trees and PVE trees Blizzard would be able to control so much better how to balance in these two hugely different situations.
I know they're trying to do this with resilience, but that's onviously not working.
And now they're trying to make resilience more important it gets even worse for the starting PVPer. Because these people don't have resilience to start with. Or at the start of a new expansion healers would just have to sit through a hundred games being one or two shot before they've managed to get the gear to stay alive a bit longer.
If you would have forced PVP talent trees (again, same trees, just different balancing) you could build in resilience talents. Or hell, the whole resilience thing would no longer be needed, since the player can only chose from talents that are balanced specifically for PVP.
I have no idea how this would work technically, but it seems possible. And it would be so nice to not see classes being nerfed because of PVP and then hurting in PVE, or the other way around.
What do you think?
Every time I read this sort of stuff I wonder if there's not a better way. I mean there must be a way to separate PVP balance from PVE balance. Because it seems to be impossible to balance all of it. And to be frank, balancing for PVP seems a lot harder anyway, since players will just sit there for hours on end and figure out how to fight against every other class. There's no way Blizzard can do this much testing internally. So the end result becomes that half the balancing are reactions to the testing done by players inside the game.
With the dual spec in, I wonder if players should be given compeltely separate PVP talent trees. This would not be your normal talent trees. It would be a completely new combination of talents specifically designed and only usable in PVP (or while PVP flagged).
You would switch to these talents in PVP situations (or on PVP servers this would be your main) and it would be balanced completely differently than the PVE talent trees. To go with what I know best. In the PVE talents you would for example be able to take casting time off penance, whereas in your PVP talents you're simply not given the option to take that talent.
When stepping into a raid, or not being flagged in any way you would work with the PVE talents that you can take.
It would of course still require the base talents to be the same, but by forcing the use of specifically balanced PVP trees and PVE trees Blizzard would be able to control so much better how to balance in these two hugely different situations.
I know they're trying to do this with resilience, but that's onviously not working.
And now they're trying to make resilience more important it gets even worse for the starting PVPer. Because these people don't have resilience to start with. Or at the start of a new expansion healers would just have to sit through a hundred games being one or two shot before they've managed to get the gear to stay alive a bit longer.
If you would have forced PVP talent trees (again, same trees, just different balancing) you could build in resilience talents. Or hell, the whole resilience thing would no longer be needed, since the player can only chose from talents that are balanced specifically for PVP.
I have no idea how this would work technically, but it seems possible. And it would be so nice to not see classes being nerfed because of PVP and then hurting in PVE, or the other way around.
What do you think?
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Random Ramblings
Some assorted news today, since it seems to be all little messages that I would like to say something about.
No patch yet
I logged in this morning and the message that was up announced a 15 minute rolling restart. Looks like the patch isn't going to drop this week yet, but I had my bets on next week already anyway.
I do have to admit that I'm looking forward to the new kitten skins. My druid won herself some upgrades in Naxx10 yesterday (yay KT staff!) and she'll be such a pretty white kitten ^_^
No instances available
I also just read on WoW.com that Blizzard is working on the 'additional instances not available' problem. Yay!
There is nothing more annoying then bouncing of the instance portal for half an hour just wasting your time away. And while Icecrown has been very good to us, on our EU server we have been running into this message a lot.
Trading Card Mounts no longer BOP
And woot, as MMO Chamption was suspecting already, the trading card mounts indeed seem to go BOE!
I have always refused to buy trading card packs, especially since the only thing I want from them is the in game loot, and it felt too much like buying my rewards. And silly as I am I rather spend hours on end to actually earn them ;)
But now I might be able to spend my hard earned in game gold on a spectral tiger mount after all, woot!
Addiction therapists signing up to World of Warcraft
I still believe that if you feel you have a WoW addiction there is an underlying problem. If your life is balanced between normal work or school, family, friends, and gaming I cannot see this being an addiction.
Not until you decide that the game comes first in the above list you should start thinking about if you have your priorities set straight. And when it comes to that, you might also want to think about why your priorities are messed up. And I find it hard to imagine that most then come to the conclusion that it is the fault of the game...
I can sooner see this a problem of not being interested/happy enough with your work/school, or social life, and fulfilling this need for happiness with something else instead. If you had turned to play sports people would call it a healthy workout, because it's gaming people call it an addiciton. Odd how that works.
Permit me to grab back to my mobile phone rant. We give young people (at the age of 5 or 6 often already) a mobile phone and teach them that commiting to appointments, and actually planning your life is not too important, because they can update it at any time.
Is it odd then that life just becomes a world of no commitment?
Is it odd that these people are eventually turning to a world where the rules are way less complicated than in the real world? Where they can count on the same encounter always being the same encounter?
I might be completely stabbing in the dark here, but might it be that the game simply offers more structure than real life, and that youngsters are really just trying to find a world with rules and borders?
Either way, this post has become a lot longer than I had planned, and I can go on ranting a bit about my visions on the world, but hey...in the end what counts is what we do with it.
If we call it an addiction it's an addiction.
After all if we would call a table a chair, it would live under that name.
No patch yet
I logged in this morning and the message that was up announced a 15 minute rolling restart. Looks like the patch isn't going to drop this week yet, but I had my bets on next week already anyway.
I do have to admit that I'm looking forward to the new kitten skins. My druid won herself some upgrades in Naxx10 yesterday (yay KT staff!) and she'll be such a pretty white kitten ^_^
No instances available
I also just read on WoW.com that Blizzard is working on the 'additional instances not available' problem. Yay!
There is nothing more annoying then bouncing of the instance portal for half an hour just wasting your time away. And while Icecrown has been very good to us, on our EU server we have been running into this message a lot.
Trading Card Mounts no longer BOP
And woot, as MMO Chamption was suspecting already, the trading card mounts indeed seem to go BOE!
I have always refused to buy trading card packs, especially since the only thing I want from them is the in game loot, and it felt too much like buying my rewards. And silly as I am I rather spend hours on end to actually earn them ;)
But now I might be able to spend my hard earned in game gold on a spectral tiger mount after all, woot!
Addiction therapists signing up to World of Warcraft
I still believe that if you feel you have a WoW addiction there is an underlying problem. If your life is balanced between normal work or school, family, friends, and gaming I cannot see this being an addiction.
Not until you decide that the game comes first in the above list you should start thinking about if you have your priorities set straight. And when it comes to that, you might also want to think about why your priorities are messed up. And I find it hard to imagine that most then come to the conclusion that it is the fault of the game...
I can sooner see this a problem of not being interested/happy enough with your work/school, or social life, and fulfilling this need for happiness with something else instead. If you had turned to play sports people would call it a healthy workout, because it's gaming people call it an addiciton. Odd how that works.
From the article: "...youngsters who are spending so much time playing these games that they have lost touch with the real world."If these youngsters exist, and if we're so worried about them. Shouldn't we think about what we're offering them in this real world of ours instead? And how youngsters are being raised?
Permit me to grab back to my mobile phone rant. We give young people (at the age of 5 or 6 often already) a mobile phone and teach them that commiting to appointments, and actually planning your life is not too important, because they can update it at any time.
Is it odd then that life just becomes a world of no commitment?
Is it odd that these people are eventually turning to a world where the rules are way less complicated than in the real world? Where they can count on the same encounter always being the same encounter?
I might be completely stabbing in the dark here, but might it be that the game simply offers more structure than real life, and that youngsters are really just trying to find a world with rules and borders?
Either way, this post has become a lot longer than I had planned, and I can go on ranting a bit about my visions on the world, but hey...in the end what counts is what we do with it.
If we call it an addiction it's an addiction.
After all if we would call a table a chair, it would live under that name.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Pug Raid Jiggy
Yes - it is possible to PUG Ulduar 25. Not only that, we kicked ass in Ulduar 25 this weekend with our pugtastic raid!
This was already the third time that we set it up, and what started with a simple "lets at least get our FL emblems" went to working on keeper Freya.
I know, I know, maybe not so much of an achievement for some of you, but this was the third time that we organized this, and we got to Freya. In fact, we almost took her down.
It does sort of help that since last week we seem to sort of have a team up with another guild - Banefire of Icecrown. Next to this all we've been doing really is make sure to gear check, and I guess we've also been quite lucky in that we've managed to get people who use their brain.
My 10man is the most relaxed group I've ever raided with within my guild, but I have to say that if you're lucky enough to find a good pug group, raiding can be as enjoyable.
What amazes me most is that everybody is pretty laid back about the loot. Normally I lay down the loot rules straight at the beginning, and though I get some clarification questions sometimes, people are cool with the DBA (Don't be an Ass) rule.
In fact, these people are being so honest that I got a boe epic item sent back to me through in game mail, because this person won an upgrade for himself. He figured that it wouldn't be fair for him to get two items.
I sent it back to him with the message that these are free rolls, and as long as people didn't keep rolling on free roll items once they had won one, they were simply lucky for that weekend.
Raid Balance
Within a pug group it's also a lot easier somehow to say to someone, "Sorry, not bringing you, since I don't believe that you're ready for this content". I've always found this one of the hardest tasks within the guild as a raidleader.
The thing is though that realistically all your raiders will have more fun if you bring 25 people who can handle the content you're tackling. And though you can bring 1 or 2 who are slightly undergeared, many more and the raid will be a lot less fun for everybody involved.
And yes, I strongly believe that having fun goes together with being succesful. For the simple reason that I cannot believe that there are people out there who find it fun to just wipe over and over for 4 hours.
What will happen in the end is that the people who need to carry a raid like this will find excuses not to be there, since they are tired of wiping on content they know they can beat. And the half that is not ready will feel bad because they are the cause of these wipes.
Communicate performance
This somehow is always a bit of a touchy point within guilds. But if you really think about it, it shouldn't be. Especially since so far I already know of two examples now where performance improved massively after people had been spoken with.
It comes down to a couple of simple truths:
- being successful on content is fun, wiping is not
- to be successful on content you have to bring a group of people who can handle that content
- if people aren't ready for content they have two options:
- get ready for this content
- give up on this content and go for easier content
- the only way for people to know that they are not ready is analysis
In a perfect world, people will always analyze their own performance, and improve where they see it fall down. But since we're not living in a perfect world we have raid leaders or class leaders. These people have specifically been put in these positions to organize and monitor the raid.
It is our job to point out that people's performance is not up to what the raid and content needs.
Of course it's the raider's responsibility to do something with the feedback provided.
And though it's never fun to tell someone that they suck, or from the other side, hear that you suck. But if dealt with in the right way you have a large chance of having a happier, more satisfied raid member AND raid group afterward.
And while it's hard, and it really sucks having to single someone out, it sucks even more to have to disappoint 20 or so raiders, because you didn't want to address the other 4 or 5.
Radio in Vent
As a completely unrelated point...Banefire has been kind enough to provide the vent we've used for our pugtastic raid two weekends in a row now. One of them runs a radio service in this vent channel, and I have to say....it's absolutely brilliant.
Having some good background music immediately provides a good atmosphere, and when things go wrong a good song seems to make it easier to shrug it off again.
Thanks Banefire!
This was already the third time that we set it up, and what started with a simple "lets at least get our FL emblems" went to working on keeper Freya.
I know, I know, maybe not so much of an achievement for some of you, but this was the third time that we organized this, and we got to Freya. In fact, we almost took her down.
It does sort of help that since last week we seem to sort of have a team up with another guild - Banefire of Icecrown. Next to this all we've been doing really is make sure to gear check, and I guess we've also been quite lucky in that we've managed to get people who use their brain.
My 10man is the most relaxed group I've ever raided with within my guild, but I have to say that if you're lucky enough to find a good pug group, raiding can be as enjoyable.
What amazes me most is that everybody is pretty laid back about the loot. Normally I lay down the loot rules straight at the beginning, and though I get some clarification questions sometimes, people are cool with the DBA (Don't be an Ass) rule.
In fact, these people are being so honest that I got a boe epic item sent back to me through in game mail, because this person won an upgrade for himself. He figured that it wouldn't be fair for him to get two items.
I sent it back to him with the message that these are free rolls, and as long as people didn't keep rolling on free roll items once they had won one, they were simply lucky for that weekend.
Raid Balance
Within a pug group it's also a lot easier somehow to say to someone, "Sorry, not bringing you, since I don't believe that you're ready for this content". I've always found this one of the hardest tasks within the guild as a raidleader.
The thing is though that realistically all your raiders will have more fun if you bring 25 people who can handle the content you're tackling. And though you can bring 1 or 2 who are slightly undergeared, many more and the raid will be a lot less fun for everybody involved.
And yes, I strongly believe that having fun goes together with being succesful. For the simple reason that I cannot believe that there are people out there who find it fun to just wipe over and over for 4 hours.
What will happen in the end is that the people who need to carry a raid like this will find excuses not to be there, since they are tired of wiping on content they know they can beat. And the half that is not ready will feel bad because they are the cause of these wipes.
Communicate performance
This somehow is always a bit of a touchy point within guilds. But if you really think about it, it shouldn't be. Especially since so far I already know of two examples now where performance improved massively after people had been spoken with.
It comes down to a couple of simple truths:
- being successful on content is fun, wiping is not
- to be successful on content you have to bring a group of people who can handle that content
- if people aren't ready for content they have two options:
- get ready for this content
- give up on this content and go for easier content
- the only way for people to know that they are not ready is analysis
In a perfect world, people will always analyze their own performance, and improve where they see it fall down. But since we're not living in a perfect world we have raid leaders or class leaders. These people have specifically been put in these positions to organize and monitor the raid.
It is our job to point out that people's performance is not up to what the raid and content needs.
Of course it's the raider's responsibility to do something with the feedback provided.
And though it's never fun to tell someone that they suck, or from the other side, hear that you suck. But if dealt with in the right way you have a large chance of having a happier, more satisfied raid member AND raid group afterward.
And while it's hard, and it really sucks having to single someone out, it sucks even more to have to disappoint 20 or so raiders, because you didn't want to address the other 4 or 5.
Radio in Vent
As a completely unrelated point...Banefire has been kind enough to provide the vent we've used for our pugtastic raid two weekends in a row now. One of them runs a radio service in this vent channel, and I have to say....it's absolutely brilliant.
Having some good background music immediately provides a good atmosphere, and when things go wrong a good song seems to make it easier to shrug it off again.
Thanks Banefire!
- Pugtastic raids Ulduar 25 on Icecrown USA at noon server Saturday and Sunday.
- If you want to join send a tell to Xphile or Shyraia.
- If you wonder if Ulduar is in Crystalsong Forest, don't even try to come, we won't bring you.
- If your gear/experience/performance is not ready for this content, we won't bring you.
- Yes, loot will drop, but if you're a loot whore, we won't bring you.
- Pugtastic works under DBA rules, and if you don't know what that means you haven't read this post properly, and are likely not able to understand instructions either, we won't bring you. (no worries, raid always starts with loot rules explanation).
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Best versus now..
Friday I asked when you looked the best, and I said I would play with WoW modelviewer a bit.I included the weapon since I still think it's one of the better looking weapons in the game, especially for a priest.
Looking through what we had does make me a little sad if I see what the tier 9 will look like.... I mean, so much less heroic...and what's up with the spikes on the shoulders?
Am I going to launch myself at the boss or something?
I guess it's cold in Northrend and that's why all the clothing makes the characters look sort of fat.
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