Category: Warcraft

What Is Hardcore?

Posted on by Gazimoff

Just what is a hardcore guild anyway? And how do you define a hardcore player? This has been a pretty big question for me and the guild I’m in. Ask around and you’ll probably get a different answer from every person. It’s one of those hard-to-define attribute that means different things to different people.

In my own mind, hardcore is raiding six nights a week, farming for flasks and food when you’re not raiding, sitting standby outside instances in-case someone’s internet goes down and letting the GM have you on speed-dial in case he needs to pull you in for the night. It’s about progress and performance, where being server first is everything and where players live or die by their World of Logs parses.

Casual is where I see myself at currently, in a guild where fun is more important than progress and attendance is a mere two nights out of three. It’s something I’ve grown comfortable in, like the grizzled veteran who still likes to show what he can do occasionally (read: pull aggro, make sarcastic comments). It’s this comfort that got disrupted a little when the Guild Master decides to convene a Guild Meeting to discuss The Rules.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m not a huge fan of blogging about my guild, especially when it’s about the more rocky moments. I don’t want to antagonise or make things worse. After all, if you’ve raided with a bunch of people for a while it’s better to work things out than throw it all in, right?

Fear not though, for this tale is not without a happy ending!

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The Merits of Old Content

Posted on by Gazimoff

One of the discussions I hear popping up every so often is about old content. It’s a bit of a shame that every time a new tier of raiding comes out that the old tier gets abandoned, gathering dust and cobwebs. The Justice and Valour point system means that new raiders can skip old content completely, using heroic instances to buy raid gear and get into the current stuff.

Content from old expansions is even less less used unless there’s a mount or a legendary weapon that can be farmed from it. Molten Core is still useful for people wanting Thunderfury, but it’s not exactly a popular destination.

So what can you use old content for? Aside from mounts and legendaries, there’s a stack of achievements just waiting to be picked up. With the new guild achievement system there’s some easy points there for people that can get their guilds organised. Plus since most content can be zerged it’s a bit of fun, especially if you’re doing 25-man dungeons with ten people.

It also allows the veterans to give a bit of a history lesson on old raids…

How about you? What do you use old raids and content for? Are you hunting for all the guild achievements? Or do you something else to let off steam as a guild?

Mages and Patch 4.2

Posted on by Gazimoff

A lot of us have been in a kind of holding pattern since 4.1 came out. Some of us have been focused on mopping up the current tier of raiding, like a roast dinner with lashings of gravy that you just need a bit of bread to polish off. Others have been filling a few gaps here and there with the troll content, using the new epics to fill a couple of gaps in our gear.

Patch 4.2 is approaching. With it comes the new Firelands raiding and questing zone, the new Mage legendary staff, a new tier of armour (and a new round of sympathy for Priests) and a truckload of other stuff besides. Putting the new juicy content to one side though, there’s the inevitable class changes as well. It’s early days so far and there’s a promise of more to come, but Mages are already tasting both sides of the nerfbat.

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Warcraft, Rift and Fun

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’m not sure if I announced this anywhere, but back in March I took a month long holiday from Warcraft to play Rift. I felt a little jaded from the game and needed to take a break, much like I occasionally take time off from my real-life job. I think its a healthy thing to do, plus it gives me the chance to look at other games on the market.

Like many people at the moment, I find myself looking at Rift and questioning my subscription. Some people I know have quit the game completely, while others like me are keeping a subscription going to both games.

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Designing My Own MMO

Posted on by Gazimoff

A while back I was challenged on Twitter to design my own MMO. I can’t remember exactly who threw down that gauntlet, but I have a feeling it was Razorbug. In the weeks that have passed I’ve been kicking the tires on this idea, thinking of how I could make a game unique enough to sound interesting yet familiar enough for players to be comfortable with it.

I wanted to share this idea with you partly to see if an “armchair designer” like me can come up with something that you might find interesting. I also want to pass the challenge on – to see what you would choose if you had a development team waiting for your MMO ideas. It’s a great exercise and it challenged me to think in a different way to my normal consumer-critic mindset. If you’re up for the challenge then give it a go!

So without further ado, let me share what’s been in my head these past few weeks…

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Playing Cards at the Carnival

Posted on by Gazimoff

Confession time: I like to take my time when levelling characters. I’ve tried levelling at breakneck speed and it just isn’t for me. Nowadays I prefer to take things at my own pace – I have a bunch of alts that still aren’t at level cap in Warcraft, while in Rift I’m only about two thirds to cap nearly two months after release. After all, what’s the rush?

Spinks recently highlighted an idea that the Everquest 2 developers are kicking around, where experienced returning players could trade cash for a max level character. I agree with her that the concept feels like a bad one, but that it’s getting difficult to justify why.

There’s a great analogy someone once made that compared MMOs to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Basically put, if the films followed the same path as many MMOs then the opening twenty minutes would be about getting the ring to Mount Doom. The rest of the first film and the remaining two would all be about getting the ring into the volcano. Feels slightly skewed, right?

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Mages & PvP – Fun, Lethal, or Both?

Posted on by Gazimoff

This guest post is from Bordy, a veteran player of games and dealer in lethal puns. You can find his unique brand of humour on Twitter @snuffleorc

I have played WoW since the retail release. Gazimoff is the one to blame for getting me into it. It was by no means though my first MMO. That honour goes to Ultima Online. Playing with a dial up connection and (in current terms) an incredibly slow PC, I both loved that game and hated it.

My recollections of the game now are vague, so my apologies for anyone who knows better, but to me the world was pretty standard fantasy fayre, although gameplay was fun. Unlike WoW, the game was classless and you picked and chose skills from across a range, meaning that the ultimate combination became so widespread that the bulk of characters were effectively (as far as I could tell) fighter-mages.

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Cheering the Armchair Designer

Posted on by Gazimoff

The Warcraft community is huge. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people writing, drawing, sharing or discussing something about the game every single day. That’s a staggering amount of people all talking about one game made by a single company.

Having such a vocal community can be a bit of a double edged sword. Whenever a change to the game is introduced it gets placed under intense scrutiny. Sometimes a change will be met with universal acclaim, while other times (although rarely for Blizzard) it’ll be met with disdain. Sometimes a change will be so controversial that it’ll split the community completely.

The most recent controversial change was Call to Arms, an attempt by Blizzard to reduce the time it takes to assemble a group for certain combat roles. While the aim is commendable, a number of bloggers (including me) noticed several flaws with the design as presented. We discussed it, shared it and importantly made suggestions about how to improve it.

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Bribes, Karma and Recommendations

Posted on by Gazimoff

Patch 4.1 is approaching, although when it’ll actually arrive is currently anyone’s guess. Content and changes are being crammed in on a regular basis, making predicting the arrival date sheer guesswork at the moment.

Call to Arms is one of the latest features to be squeezed into the patch. Essentially the change amounts to a bribe to persuade tanks (and occasionally healers) to queue by themselves for heroic groups by offering them an additional reward when they complete the dungeon.

The rewards on offer to those that respond to the Call are a mix of the following:

  • More gold
  • A chance of a rare gem, flasks or potions (basically more gold)
  • A good chance of a dungeon drop only non-combat pet
  • A rare chance of a dungeon drop only mount

Although the Call to Arms can in theory be triggered for any role, it’ll always go for the one that’s needed most. In the majority of cases this will be the tank, although occasionally it’ll be healers that are most in need. It is highly unlikely that this will trigger for DPS roles.

The goal is that this will reduce the queue times for DPS, providing them with a better LFD experience.

It will not work.

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The Finished Next-Gen MMO Machine

Posted on by Gazimoff

Apologies for the lack of updates, but I’ve been a little busy. I’ve previously talked about putting together a new PC to handle the next range of MMO games on the horizon. This hasn’t been some kind of hypothetical question about building something in my mind – I was really planning on building a new rig. After months of planning and some heavy work during the weekend, it’s finally done!

The parts were ordered, checked and prepped ready for installation. I’m told variously that the dining table looked either like some kind of Geek Christmas or a Shrine to Technology. Either way that makes me some kind of Geek Santa or techno-Oracle, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

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