Category: Warcraft

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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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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Looking For Dramatic Change

Posted on by Gazimoff

If you ever wanted a minute by minute reading of why tanks and healers feel special, you need look no further than the infamous Looking for Dungeon tool. It’s a bit radical to see tanks get insta-pop dungeons and healers have maybe five minutes while DPS are left to sit around for maybe an hour or more.

Ever wanted to feel third-class? Just roll a pure-class DPS and watch as the queue mocks you, again and again.

But why is this? Surely if we got more people to play tanks or healers then we’d all win from shorter queues? I’m not sure. We’ve had two major tanking changes, firstly to make non-Warrior tanks much more viable and secondly to introduce a whole new class to persuade people to tank. I’ll admit that the LFD tool was introduced after these changes, but still – that means that either nothing has got better or (shudder) things were actually worse than I remember.

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The Last MMO on the Street

Posted on by Gazimoff

It’s difficult to argue against the hype that a strong retail release can generate. Pictures of gamers lining up in the cold and the dark to be the first to get their hands on a new game make for great newspaper articles and TV features.

There’s also the social part of being one of these gatherings. There’s a feeling of being a band of brothers in arms, as if we’re all members of some secret club sharing knowing winks and inside jokes.

But is it, when all is said and done, actually needed?

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Comparing Mages: Warcraft Vs. Rift

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s a common theme among fantasy MMOs. It doesn’t matter what game it is, you can expect to find the same three character classes. There’ll always be a plate wearing warrior type that’s ready to soak up the damage and a cleric or priest (or even minstrel) type that throws out healing.

Then there’s the spellcaster. Mage, warlock or elementalist, there’s always someone throwing around balls of some description. They also tend to have similar mechanics for casting spells and so on. How can a new MMO make itself feel any different?

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Managing Limited Game Time

Posted on by Gazimoff

There are times when I miss my youth. Back when I was a student I’d be free to play the night away, blasting cyborgs in Quake 2 or bludgeoning head-crabs in Half-Life. I’d blitz through a game in four days straight, chomping through single player content like a man possessed.

The other thing was that back then I’d play through a lot of games. I’d consider buying a new title once or twice a month to give me something new to play. I’d adventure across a multitude of worlds, shooting my way to liberty, freedom or glory.

Warcraft has changed this. In the time I’ve been subscribing I’ve bought maybe a handful of other games for the PC. Gordon from We Fly Spitfires asked a great question recently about what the gaming landscape would be like without the game. For me and probably a fair few others we would never have entered the MMO genre.

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The Incredible Shrinking Raidgroup

Posted on by Gazimoff

I wanted to focus on a particular experiment that Blizzard’s been working on over the years – that of the optimum raid size.  We’ve seen raid sizes start at 40 players in Vanilla, but slowly drop to 25 in Burning Crusade and then 10 players in Wrath. With the new lockout system in Cataclysm, 10-player raiding seems to be becoming the default.

Is smaller raiding the best result through? From a content standpoint Blizzard certainly seems to think so – more groups are running 10-player dungeons than ever before, defeating more bosses and getting more loot from it. Don’t trust me – Lissanna  from Restokin did an excellent analysis of the available stats. The stats might encourage Blizzard to go further down this route by either dropping 25-player raiding entirely or producing 10-player exclusive content. After all, it’s easier to balance for ten players than both ten and 25.

Hang on a minute though – weren’t we raiding dungeons with 8 or 15 people back in Vanilla? And didn’t we think back then that they were just dungeons but nothing special? Sure, they might take an evening to clear but that was the same 5 years ago.

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