Is the LFR expected or optional?

I was reading and posting in an online forum on a WoW-related topic.  In the discussion, someone spilled the beans about the ending of the Dragon Soul raid and storyline.  Another person said, “Dude, put SPOILER ALERT on that so we know not to read it if we haven’t done it yet.”

At this point, the person who had asked for the spolier alert was raked over the coals in the way that WoW trolls really know how.  They accused him of being a failure at the game because, at this point, only a total loser has not cleared the Dragon Soul in the LFR.

I stepped in to disagree, saying that I preferred to raid with my guild and so I, also, have not done the LFR raids yet.

Then the tide of opinion turned against me, saying that I should be running LFR to get gear to help with normal mode raiding.  The fact that it is super-easy was the main argument for its necessity.

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I feel like I’m part of a dying breed in WoW.  The main joy of raiding for me is playing with my long-time gaming friends.  There is no thrill in loot.  Loot lost its appeal to me back in BC when epic purple gear became more common than rare blue-level gear.  My joy comes from the shared experience of overcoming the obstacle that the devs have set before us.  For that reason, I’d much rather run the raid in normal mode, using gear I got in normal mode Firelands and by running heroics.

Basically, I see the LFR as a nice alternate path for those who want/need it.  I don’t see it as a necessary part of the gearing-up process.

Am I the minority here?

Add-On dependence

Since I’ve had trouble with Curse Client this week, its made me realize what a large number of add-ons I use.

This is not intentional.  Its just “add-on creep” – meaning that over my 6+ years of playing I have gradually added more add-ons while not removing many.

Here’s what I use right now:

• Dominos for my bars
• X-Perl for unit frames
• SexyMap to move and configure my minimap
• Elkano Buff Bars for my buffs/debuffs
• ChocolateBar (replacing FuBar) for my indicators across the top of the screen, including
• Fubar2Broker to make my FuBar add-ons functional
• MoneyFu to track my income
• PerformanceFu to monitor my game performance
• ReputationFu to track my faction reputations
• GarbageFu to automatically get rid of crap that I loot
• DurabilityFu to automate my gear repairs
• OmniCC to put a timer on my cooldowns
• Outfitter to manage my gear sets
• Arkinventory to organize my bags
• GoGoMount to use a different mount each time I mount up
• Archy for my occasional dabbles in archaeology
• FishingBuddy and FishermansFriend to make my time fishing go smoothly
• IronChef to help my cooking go faster
• SleekFreeBagSlots to show my free space on the toons that don’t use Arkinventory
• StealYourCarbon to simplify restocking of basic reagents
• SpamMeNot to block annoying goldsellers

Then there are the add-ons I use to raid.

• PowerAuras to tell me about important procs
• SmartBuff to remind me to rebuff or repoison
• Deadly Boss Mods for raid encounters
• Omen Threat Meter
• Nug Combo Bar to show my combo points in my field of view
• Event Horizon as a timer for my abilities
• Recount with several plug-ins for damage/healing tracking
• EnsidiaFails to see who messed up after a wipe
• BigBrother to make sure that everyone has food/flasks
• Clique and Grid on my healer characters
• Decursive on any characters than can decurse or dispel
• Tauntmaster on my tank toon
• KAHolyPower for my paladin

Then there are my auction/gold-making add-ons

• TradeSkillMaster for sheer awesomeness
• Enchantrix to automate prospecting/milling/disenchanting
• Postal to quickly send/receive my hundred of mails from the auction house.
• MillHelp to see what my herbs will mill into

Plus many of these add ons use libraries which also need to be updated.

Very few of my add-ons actually have a direct impact on my game play.  On my rogue, its basically NugComboBar and Event Horizon.  On my priest and druid healers its Grid, Clique, and Decursive.  For my paladin its KAHolyPower, TauntMaster, and EventHorizon.  And DBM, of course, on any characters in a raid.  Other than those, the vast majority of the add-ons are for convenience and to automate everyday tasks or to reorganize my UI.

To keep this up to date manually would be a huge chore.  Now that Curse is uninstalled, I have to decide what to do.  How many of these can/should I remove?  How much frustration will I feel when I have to remember to do things that used to be automated (like rebuff or repair or empty my bags of grey items)?  How annoyed will I be when I start getting goldselling spam or forget to restock my poisons?  How long would it take me to get used to a simpler, more vanilla UI?  I’m so used to these things as part of my game experience.

 

Dinaer casts Mass Resurrection on “Forever a Noob”

Its been over a month since I posted anything here.

Its not that I went away or stopped playing.  It was really two things…

• Demands on my real-life time were so great that I barely had time to play the game, and never has a moment to write about it
• I used to write some posts during down time at work, but my schedule this year has prevented that
• There has been nothing compelling going on in the game that has me excited enough to write about

I’ve been playing the game about 3-4 nights a week (down from 6-7), mostly just logging on to raid, and then logging off after the raid had completed.  I was tired of the troll heroics and had nothing to gain by accumulating JP and VP.

My guild has continued to raid.  We just killed Ragnaros (10 man, normal) this week, which was a great achievement for us.  The guild has two raid groups going.  My group is moving on to Dragon Soul now, and the other is still finishing Firelands.  We didn’t manage to get the caster legendary staff from Firelands yet, but we’re going to continue working on it (we’ve never gotten a legendary while it was current content, so the fact that we’re close is exciting).

I won’t be playing SWTOR.  A lot of my guildies will, so my fingers are crossed that we don’t lose them.

The only non-raiding activity that was really keeping my interest was making gold.  I’ve had a glyph business since Wrath, but I have been slowly ramping up my JC/Enchanting activity.  I did a lot of work to prepare for patch 4.3, and I’ll probably pull in almost 100k in the span of the week following the patch.  I’m at over 300k gold now.  Go for a million?  Probably not, unless the next expansion offers some exciting new markets.

Patch 4.3 has brought new attention on rogues due to the presence of the Rogue legendary daggers available in Dragon Soul.  A lot of people have rolled rogues lately, so there are a lot of new backstabbers trying to learn the craft.  Also, there are a lot of experienced rogues aiming for those daggers.  Those are the issues which have brought me back to the blog.  I’ll try to post more… at least during the lull in school/band/little league baseball seasons while I have some free time.

 

Blizzcon Quick Impression

Opening ceremony and the big WoW announcement is, as expected, the next expansion.  And, also as expected, its the Mists of Panderia, with Pandaren as a playable race.

Immediately, a lot of players boo-hooed this as the death of the game and claimed that they were not going to play a game with pandas.

My first question is, why are pandaren any worse than werewolves?  Are there a lot of closet Twilight fans out there that really liked werewolves?  Would this announcement have been better with sparkly vampires instead of pandas?

Anyway, on to serious impressions.  I think this could be a good thing.

The past few expansions have been leading more and more to WoW being a pure endgame treadmill.  They follow a similar pattern…

• expansion comes out, people powerlevel as fast as they can to level cap
• jump into endgame, where most bosses are the target of complaints that they are either rehashes of old bosses, or too gimmicky
• stay in endgame for two years until burnout ensues
• next expansion, start over

This model cannot continue.  I think that repeating the same ideas for another expansion would have been much worse.  Since this expansion doesn’t have a big-name end boss, I am hoping that the pattern will be different this time around.

We need more things to do when not raiding.  We need a reason to leave Stormwind/Orgimmar.  We need more interaction between players.  Whatever may come of this expansion, if its not all endgame-focused then I have hope that Blizzard is ready to try and break the mold.  Perhaps it will keep my interest for another few years.

Blizzcon is coming

…and once again I am not going.  But I am going to watch online.

I think this is a make-or-break moment for WoW.  They need to generate some excitement, because its getting a little old.  This always happens late in the expansion cycle, but I think more so this time because (1) the game is almost seven years old, and (2) there are more high-quality competing MMORPGs out or coming out than there have ever been.

I worry that they will focus most of Blizzcon on Diablo and Starcraft.  In that case, I think that WoW’s death spiral may begin in earnest.

I think the biggest mistake they made with Cataclysm was that their changes remove or changed rather than added.  Previous expansions added not just zones but also new avenues of gameplay.

• Burning Crusade added new races (Draenei and Blood Elves) and playable classes (horde got paladins, alliance got shamans).  It also added expanded talent trees and new talents.
• Wrath of the Lich King added a hero class (Death Knight) and expanded talent trees and new talents.
• Cataclysm gave us no new races and no new classes (they did give us worgen and goblins.  I overlooked them since they were purely cosmetic additions).  It shrunk the talent trees and decreased the number of talent points.  I know they had good reason, but it still becomes a “taking away” action rather than “adding”.  It had only 5 new levels, which re-emphasized how the leveling game was being pushed aside in favor of endgame.

Because of this, I really think that the next expansion needs to add more than some new levels and zones.  I think that it needs at least a new class and/or race.  I also think they need to add some kind of new mechanic in the game that is new.  I can’t imagine what it could be, but I think we need some kind of departure from repetitive  instances/raids with the holy trinity.  I won’t even speculate, but Blizzard has very well-paid developers who spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff, so I am hoping they will surprise me.

Finally, a graphical upgrade is vital.  WoW has survived this long on its cartoony graphics because it was still the only big game on the block, and the expanse of the world superceded any graphical complaints.  Also, the low hardware requirements made it accessible to the masses.  Now that Rift has taken its best shot and Star Wars is coming, I think that WoW needs to grow up a bit and realize that they can’t continue to survive on gameplay alone and formatting the game to be playable on 5-year old hardware.

We’ll see how it all plays out.  Maybe some of this is planned but it won’t be announced this week.  By next week either our excitement will be renewed, or we’ll all be disappointed.

What are the oldest WoW blogs left around?

We’ve seen a wave of notable WoW bloggers hanging up their keyboards lately.  It got me to thinking – how many old WoW blogs are still left around?

Playing WoW in the early days was quite a different experience than it is now.  There were not countless online information sources for you to browse through to learn every little detail about the game.  Your information came from Thottbot, or maybe Allakazam.  Wowhead came much later.  There were almost no YouTube videos.  There was no accessible Elitist Jerks forum.  If you wanted to learn about your class or a raid boss, your best bet was to read blogs.

WoWInsider goes back to November of 2005, so its the grandfather of WoW blogs.  However, none of the original authors are still with them.  Their structure makes it so they can be continuous even with frequent writer turnover.  Tobold goes back even farther but his blog is not just a WoW blog.  There was a huge surge in the number of personal WoW blogs in 2007, which is when I discovered the expansive depth of the WoW blogosphere.

I remember the first few blogs I encountered and read by in my early days of WoW – Resto4Life, Parry! Dodge! Spin!, BigRedKitty, and Frostbolt.  All  of those have long since shut down.  However, Frostbolt is still viewable, even though it is not being updated.  I started my historical research project there – looking through antiquated evidence on the corpses of dead blogs.  I decided to check out Frostbolt’s blogroll.  It is still listing the blogs that he read back in those days.

I went down his list of blogs, and the only two that were listed there that are still posting now are Kinless’ Chronicles and Gray Matter.  Kinless has switched to Rift.  Does that mean that Gray Matter is the oldest from the wave of early WoW blogs?  His archives go back to September 2007.

On a hunch I went to check Big Bear Butt.  I know I’ve been reading his stuff for a long while.  His archives go back to August 2007, so he started just before Gray Matter.  Maybe his is the oldest personal WoW blog still running.

Looking further, I found that one of my favorite bits of WoW entertainment, Need More Rage, has posts going to July 2007.  Could this be the oldest active WoW blog?

Nope.  Checking around some more, I found that Mania’s Arcania has posts going back to April 2007.  Mystic Chicanery has posts from February 2007.  Leafshine goes back even farther – to January 2007.

Kaliope’s WoW Crafting Blog goes all the way to November 2006.  I remember reading that blog when I first disocovered online WoW research tools.  I was kind of surprised to see it still up and running.  I know that WoWHead has satisfied all of my crafting research needs.  Its neat that she has kept her niche in the online community.

After lots of browsing around, the longest-running personal WoW blog that I could find is Blessing of Kings.  Coriel started the blog in December 2005 and has continued to post regularly until now.  That’s a pretty amazing feat of longevity, especially when you consider that the focus and high level of content has not diminished in all that time.

Have I missed any?  Are there any that have been around longer than Blessing of Kings?

The Perfect Age for WoW

Recently, Larisa at the Pink Pigtail Inn wrote a post about being an older player (which she defined as being in her 40′s).

I am the same age as Larisa, and the majority of the core of my guild is within +/- 10 years of that.  I don’t really consider myself an older player.  In fact, I feel like this game was written for my generation.

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This game has its roots set firmly in the high fantasy genre.  The presence of fantasy in literature goes far back in history.  While there are examples found as long ago as Shakespeare, the sword-and-sorcery archetype traces most directly to works such as the Chronicles of Narnia (published in the 1950′s) and The Lord of the Rings (also published in the 1950′s).  As these works gained in popularity, the generation that followed was the first to be regularly exposed to high fantasy authors.

Those who grew up in the 1960′s and 1970′s were the first generation that could easily find Fantasy sections in the bookstore and the local library.

Those folks would be in their 50′s now.  We see a lot more players in WoW in their 40′s than we see players in their 50′s.  I think that is due to a major development that connects the fantasy genre to gaming…

Dungeons and Dragons was released in the mid-70′s but really hit its stride in the late 70′s and early 80′s.  Dungeons and Dragons combined the high fantasy genre with interactive elements and created a game, much like WoW, where the players used magic and might to fight dragons and other creatures.

To recap:  anyone who was in their teens in the late 70′s and early 80′s had been raised  among the growing presence of high fantasy literature, and then had Dungeons and Dragons dropped into their lap.  That specific group of people would be in their 30′s -40′s right now.

But that’s not all.  People in that age group have had the chance to live through the rise of the personal computer.  The 1980′s saw the release of the Apple II and Commodore 64.  Before long, games such as Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale became extremely popular.  These games brought visuals to what had been a pen-and-paper activity before.  They had no animation to speak of, but the still images used to illustrate the action added a new aspect to fantasy gaming.

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To summarize so far:

If you were born in the late 60′s or early 70′s then you

• grew up with readily available fantasy literature
• were around for the creation and rise of Dungeons and Dragons
• lived through the introduction of the personal computer and the creation of fantasy computer games which followed

There’s yet one more factor that I’ll throw into the mix here.  That same generation went away to college in the late 80′s or early 90′s.  At this time the idea of computer networks was young but growing.  There was no internet (as you now know it) at this point, but there were things like IRC chat and BBS forums.  And from that framework came MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons).  These were text-based games that could be played by hundreds of people at once from remote locations.  This was the progenitor of the MMO.  DikuMUD, in fact, can be directly traced as the basis for Everquest, which has obvious links to WoW.

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Now I can connect this to myself.  I lived the timeline detailed above.  In my youth I ate up fantasy novels as fast as my allowance could buy them.  When Dungeons and Dragons came out, my friends and I played a continuous campaign for all of my high school years.

I had a Commodore 64 as a teenager, I cut my teeth on programming with it, learned to love the fantasy games, starting with text-based games like Zork and moving up to still image games like A Bard’s Tale.

I played MUDs in college and was amazed at the added dimension of playing with hundred of other people simultaneously.

When Everquest came out in 1999 it was as if everything I had ever loved were wrapped up in one package and presented to me.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time or finances to play EQ, with a new job and new family at the time.  However, when WoW came out, I was on it immediately.

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World of Warcraft was written for ME.

My life experience is not unique, though, so I’d extend it to say that World of Warcraft was written for all the nerdy kids of my generation.  All of us who imagined ourselves as Frodo with the One Ring or Shea Ohmsford wielding the Sword of Shannara or Garion trying to learn his powers from Polgara and Belgarath.  Those of us who guided their fighter/thief through battles with bugbears in D&D, who sat in the tavern in the town of Skara Brae to get a new quest in Bard’s Tale, and who meticulously assembled their party in Pool of Radiance.

The younger kids who play WoW are certainly having fun, and I don’t begrudge them their enjoyment one bit.  But they are Johnny-come-lately to the party.  People in their 30′s-40′s are the ideal audience for this game.

P.S. – The stuff about older players having slower reaction time is nonsense when it comes to WoW.  This isn’t a twitch reaction game or a FPS.  A 40 year old can bang on the numbers 111111111222222222111111333333 on the keyboard just as well as a 13 year old.  Server lag is a much bigger factor than reaction time in this game.

Doing the old AQ Opening Questline, Part 1

(The pictures are minimized, so click them to see larger versions if interested)

We all do odd things when we are bored.

I first became interested in the AQ questline through cooking.  On a lark, I looked to see how many cooking recipes I had.  I realized that I had almost every recipe in the game, except a couple of horde-only ones and a few hard-to-get ones.  I had my wife get me the horde ones to me through the neutral AH, and then I was left with just Dirge’s Kickin’ Chimaerok Chops – an epic recipe that drops as part of the AQ opening questline.

Aside:  for those who are new to the game… back in 2006 when the Ahn’Qiraj raids were first added to the game, the gates were initially closed.  It took a server-wide effort to get them opened, and there was a huge rep grind and quest chain.  The first one to finish the chain and open the gates got a unique title and mount.

The questline can still be done today, except for the last step since the gates are already open on all servers.

So I started grinding Brood of Nozdormu rep by doing the rare AQ pug raid.  You start at Hated and have to get to Neutral before you can do the quests.  I just got to Neutral this week and started the quests.

First, you talk to Anachronos, standing outside of the Caverns of Time.  He’s part of the Brood of Nozdormu so he’s not hostile to me anymore).

He sends you to Silithus, outside AQ.  You look in a crystal there and you see the dramatic events played out before you.  Fandral Staghelm and four dragons appear before you.

One at a time, the dragons turn from their human guise to their dragon form to combat the Qiraj forces before the gates.

Finally, Anachronos and Fandral Staghelm realize that the Qiraj forces are too many, and together they they magically seal the gates.

Anachronos gives Staghelm a sceptre that can open the gates if ever there is a reason.  Staghelm was in the midst of an emotional breakdown because his son was killed in the fight against the Qiraj.  He refuses the responsibility and shatters the sceptre.

Anachronos takes the pieces of the sceptre and gives them to the blue, red, and green dragonflights for safekeeping.  The rest of the questline involves retrieving the pieces.  I’ll need to visit Eranikus of the green dragonflight (in Sunken Temple), Vaelestraz of the red dragonflight (in Blackwing Lair) and Azuregos of the blue dragonflight (in Azshara).  They will each have their own tasks to complete.

Along the way I will have to visit and kill several world raid bosses that are unique to this questline.  Did you know there is a raid boss on the Isle of Dread off the coast of Ferelas?  Or another one on Alcaz Island in Dustwallow Marsh?  How about a summonable one in the water off of Azshara?  They all required 30+ people to kill back in vanilla WoW, but I should be able to solo or duo most of them now.  I’ll document some of this and post it for posterity.

Real Names on Blizzard forums?

WoW.com just posted a link from Blizzard with a surprising piece of information.  Now that the RealID system is in place, the plan is that all posts on official Blizzard forums will show the real name of the poster.

I’ll be surious to see if they hold the line on this or back off.  I expect there to be a lot of backlash.

On one hand, people will be less likely to troll when their real name is attached to their obnoxious posts.

On the other hand, people who are concerned with internet privacy will most likely not post on the Blizzard forums at all.  If your name is attached to your posts, then people will see those posts by Googling your name.

Personally,  I like to keep my personal, professional, and gaming lives separate.  I have different email accounts for each aspect of my life, and I am careful to minimize overlap.  As a teacher, I’m not sure that I want my students to follow my doings in Azeroth.

Also, in the current information age we all know that businesses will Google the names of job applicants.  If you wouldn’t put your WoW accomplishments on your resume, then you probably don’t want a prospective employer to find out about that side of your life.

Facebook recently took a lot of flak when they made their information less private.  I am sure that Blizzard will face the same criticism.  I don’t post on the official forums very often, but with this in place I am even less likely to do so.