Month: March 2011

An Appreciation of Developers

Posted on by Gazimoff

Earlier this week I stumbled on a brilliant idea from Scarybooster. For a couple of years now he’s been running Developer Appreciation Week, a chance for us to say thanks to all those in the video games industry who make our lives that little bit better.

I know I’ve been a grouchy malcontent recently, poking holes and picking problems. Yet to be fair, Scarybooster has a point. I honestly can’t remember the last time I stood up and said “You know what, for all its faults you still made a bloody great game that I’ve had great fun playing.” Sure, I might think certain things could be better but that doesn’t mean that the fatalistic “everything sucks” approach is the right one.

That said, there are some groups of people within the video game industry that I wanted to single out for special thanks. While I appreciate the work of everyone who spends their day job producing this form of entertainment, I reckon these folks deserve a particular mention.
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Burnout By The Numbers

Posted on by Gazimoff

It’s ironic that almost a year ago I was writing about the same topic and how to cope with it. Back then, players were complaining about being burned out with Wrath. They’d done everything they wanted to, achieved what they wanted and were ready to throw in the towel. I was as well, which is why I wrote about how I cope with hitting a gaming rut.

Yet here we are, a slim 14 weeks since Cataclysm was released and feeling burned out already. These aren’t just isolated cases either – MMO Melting Pot reports that 75% of all respondents to a burnout article on WoW Insider are themselves struggling with the problem.

So what gives? What turns a loyal fanbase of players into burned out deserters in the space of three and a half months?
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Blueprint for a Next-Gen MMO Machine

Posted on by Gazimoff

This post is part two in my series on the Next-Gen MMO Machine. The first part is about salvaging and keeping your existing good stuff, while the part on getting the latest accessories is still to come!

Once I’ve worked out what I’m going to keep and what’s going to get trashed or donated to someone else, it’s time to work out the budget. I always find it pretty important to keep a hard cap on the amount you’re going to spend. It’s easy to persuade yourself into spending a little extra for things here and there, and before you know it your build costs double. If you’re going to buy off the shelf the same thing applies – be ruthless and discard systems that are over budget by 10%.

Don’t forget hidden costs as well – have you factored in taxes like VAT or sales tax? What about shipping costs? There’s even import duy to consider if you’re having something shipped from a seller overseas. You might want to carve your budget up and set aside a chunk of money for all these unexpected things.

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Building the Next-Gen MMO Machine

Posted on by Gazimoff

Part One: Laying The Foundations

I’ve been hoping to pull this off for a while now. My faithful companion, commonly known as “Gazdesktop” but affectionately known as “that black monolith that weighs a ton” is finally going to be upgraded. The stars have aligned, the gods have smiled upon me and the process has begun. It is once again time to scour all known tech resources in pursuit of that final PC blueprint called The Spec.

The reason I want to upgrade is simple: PC gaming is more than just World of Warcraft. There are other games that are vying for my attention that I want to be able to enjoy to their fullest. While my current rig will churn out a healthy framerate in Stormwind, it’s really starting to struggle with anything more current. With Aion, Rift, The Secret World and Star Wars: The Old Republic all using higher quality graphics I’d like to have a machine that can do them justice.

I’d also like to have a bit more headroom when recording videos. FRAPS is pretty resource intensive and Sony Movie Studio can take a while to encode a video, so anything that makes this easier is a Good Thing. Besides, I fancy giving machinima a go!

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My Folly Against The Entitlesloth

Posted on by Gazimoff

I feel like a conflict has been brewing inside of me for the past few days. It’s one of those horrible conflicts of ideologies that I can’t see any easy way to resolve. And what makes it worse is that both sides of the conflict are borne of a single source.

You see, I want to help players become better.

Part of that is by writing guides, making videos and helping people in-game. I don’t see anything wrong with being a bad player if you have a willingness to improve. The players I don’t want are the greedy entitlesloths – the lazy players who play badly, know they play badly and insist on continuing to play badly. The players who then inflict their laziness onto others by abusing LFD, expecting to be carried through dungeons on a dais to scoop up loot like peeled grapes.

But in my desire to stigmatise the entitlesloth I fear that I contribute to a culture of elitism. A mindset of “You must be this skilled to enter”. I see people who play in spite of their real-life restrictions and limitations, the people who rely on Warcraft to provide them with an escape from their real world situation. And I feel ashamed that the culture I help support probably makes them feel unwelcome and unwanted.

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Caster Legendary Staff: The Lowdown

Posted on by Gazimoff

UPDATE: I’ve done a big roundup of all the most important news relating to Dragonwrath, along with a guide on how to make sure you get one as quickly as possible. You can find all this and more here!

It’s only recently emerged in the Public Test Realm datafiles, but the internet is already rife with speculation about the new Legendary Caster Staff. The dataminers over at MMO-Champion have been diligently hard at work, while the folks over at WoW Insider have been putting their theories to the test. But if you’re looking at putting your hands on one of these incredibly desirable staves how would you go about it?

Possible Caster Legendary Staff (from MMO-Champion.com)

Much like a visit to your local Ikea, this new piece of raiding equipment will come with some assembly required. You’re going to need to do a lot of raiding in order to collect all the materials needed, as well as deep pockets to pick up all those vendor-only items. You’ll also need to work with your guild or raid team in order to ensure success, just as with Shadowmourne. At the moment though we don’t know the whole picture, so a lot of this is conjecture.

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What Cataclysm Means to World PVP

Posted on by moguestposter

This guest post is from Bordy, a longtime friend who doesn’t have a blog of his own and so decided to use mine. You can find him on Twitter @snuffleorc.

Who among us Vanilla Veterans does not look fondly back to the mass battles between Southshore and Tarren Mill? Cataclysm wasn’t what ended these, but it certainly prevented it ever recurring, with the loss of Southshore as an Alliance town.

Southshore and Tarren Mill were roughly equidistant from faction cities (Ironforge and Undercity respectively). The geography of the land was suitable to mass PvP too: No town walls, roughly flat (albeit with a small slope), mostly open ground with minor cover/obstacles and a small tower in the middle. Designers of battlegrounds should take note!

Of course what actually put an end to the SS vs. TM battles was the creation of battlegrounds. These could be instanced and thus enabled Blizzard to spread the server load of all those wanting to participate. The old SS/TM battles could get very laggy, as fun as they were. Battlegrounds though do not, for the most part, offer mass PvP in open ground. Warsong Gulch is just too small (in as far as combatants go), Arathi Basin has a few more combatants and of very uneven terrain. Eye of the Storm again splits forces up. Alterac Valley comes close at times, but is spread out and more recently simply involves a chase to kill NPCs. Strand of the Ancients, Wintergrasp, and Tol Barad all involve assaulting and defending.

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One Year Old!

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’m not usually one to celebrate milestones, but I think this one is worth sharing – Mana Obscura has made it to it’s first anniversary! It’s taken a fair bit of work to get this far, but it’s also been a lot of fun and incredibly worthwhile.

The blog started off on March 1st 2010 with this post. That initial scrawl set the scene for what has been a strange and often chaotic journey through Warcraft and gaming culture. My discussion on Escaping the Vortex of Suck was probably the most memorable from the early days, and was one of those times where I was cackling like an evil henchman while clacking away at the keyboard. Shortly after that I moved the blog to it’s own domain.

Of course, I couldn’t resist doing an April fool joke last year (although some people thought I was serious!). I’ve done my fair share of other silly stuff, including a lighthearted look at the fish you can find in Vashj’ir. I also listed my three Christmas wishes, hoping for an amusing end to some of those in-game narks we all face.

I’ve also had a few rants as well. There’s been the infamous one about TERA, the one about Authenticators and the one about ‘casual’ not being a derogatory term. It’s been interesting to see the discussions these posts have kicked off.

We also kicked off The Obscurecast back in May. Still going strong and now at 33 episodes its now all grown up and at it’s own home at obscurecast.com. If you’re quick you can still enter the Talk Like A Gilnean competition running over there!

Real-life does sometimes cause a break in blogging, but last year I had the best reason ever for some time away. We had a fantastic day that still brings a smile to my face when I remember it, and some fantastic photos to boot!

So, what of the future? I’m still blogging and podcasting, although an ever-changing workload means I don’t get as much time to write these days. Still, it’s good to be able to get in front of the keyboard and put my thoughts down on paper. Even if the paper’s some kind of digital representation riddled with metaphor. Or something.

It’s likely that Mana Obscura will contain ongoing references to spellcasters in other games. I’ll still be writing about Warcraft (I’m still playing it after all!) but I’ll also occasionally talk about other games I’m playing (currently Rift, Minecraft and Dragon Age: Origins). I hope this’ll still be appealing to you, although feel free to shout if there’s something in particular you’d like to hear more of!

Before I finish up I’d like to thank everyone that’s given me help over the year. A huge amount of thanks go to the community over at BlogAzeroth for helping me with so many things. I’d like to also thank Stu, Pewter and Medros for helping with the podcast. I’m hugely grateful to Windsoar and the Mage Forum moderators for keeping things tidy there as well.

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who’s visited the blog, posted a comment, subscribed to the feed, sent me an email or grabbed me on Twitter. You’ve helped me to keep writing even when it’s been tough and challenging, or when I’ve been running short of time and thought about throwing in the towel, and I owe you all a huge debt of gratitude.

Anyway, enough from me. Here’s to a year that’s done and many more to come!