Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Heroic progression through ICC
Busy week, little time for updates! So a couple of resets ago we did down the Lich King on 25-man mode, unlocking heroic for the big baddies. As expected - there's a lot more to take and recieve in here with bigger numbers, more twists and perhaps a small dose luck involved. I can't help but feel that this is the way these bosses are meant to be (well, that's the truth right?), and it makes me happy the challenge is there for us. I didn't attend it but they did Marrowgar and Gunship (yeah...) on heroic mode at the start of the reset, and then we banged heads against Festergut for a couple hours until we killed him with two seconds left to the enrage. It was an interesting journey - where if a single thing went wrong we fell behind, if a single person died, if a single vile gas got chained... it was exciting. It reminded me of my first kills of Brutallus and such at 70, where you'd after a long chain of tries would just nail it all down right at the finishing line (or just past it, killing enraged bosses is always fun for first kills). Then, we one-shot Rotface on heroic. Yeah. One person standing. Awesome fun. Looking forward to every progress raid coming up and seeing what the rest of Heroic As-It-Was-Meant-To-Be Icecrown Citadel has in store.
Monday, February 15, 2010
The end tier of this expansion
Wrath of the Lich King has so far been very different from a raiding perspective compared to the original game and burning crusade. There's amazing amounts of complaints as well as chanting for the new system with a smaller and bigger version of all raid instances and the introduction in Ulduar of hardmodes. People are already at Lich King on hardmode in 25-man. Me and my guild though, tried him on normal mode in 25's yesterday for the first time seriously and did pretty decent getting halfway through last phase a couple of times. "The game is too easy" you hear a lot these days. I don't know. All bosses in the Sunwell at end of TBC were killed first day they got released through the gating there, except the last ones that took one or two additional days. This were one of the raids that was deemed among the hardest/best raid instances made so far. We're on monday of this reset now. The other 11 bosses are down on heroic. Lich King isn't. He's in other words been alive for longer than what any encounter in Sunwell offered so far. Yeah, this is at a guess because of Blizzard's new gating system - limited tries. You could wipe on M'uru and Kil'jaeden as many times as there was hours on the clock, but you only have max 20 tries for Arthas - but as many that follow the worldfirst progress of raiding may know a lot of top guilds these days employ a new way to circumvent the limited tries: clone alts.
To squeeze in more attempts and learn more, there's quite a few players that have identical extra characters they've geared up to practice with. Same class, same talents, picking up the same gear. While the world of seeking world firsts is in its own dimension, I'm not sure the gating helped. Seems it just made way for another case of "clever usage of game mechanics". These people won't stop trying anything to get their job done no matter what is put in their way. And it largely doesn't affect the other guilds behind them. Maybe if they put the limited tries on an accountwide basis there'd be no loopholes - but seriously, there's been enough silly band-aid fixes recently.
Nothing will be impossible or too hard for the guys at the front. For everyone else? My guild ain't the best of the best, but I daresay we're a decent bunch. Game is too easy? Game will always be beaten by those that try their furthest to do so. So far, the Lich King has proven to be a fun, challenging and immersive encounter for us. And likely the same for everyone else at our level or those that raid more casually. The majority, in other words, the target group of player Blizzard has tried so hard to balance the game around this expansion. I'd say they succeeded in finding the difficulty to an okay level here in the end tier of this expansion. I hope whatever awaits us in Cataclysm will be worth the wait.
To squeeze in more attempts and learn more, there's quite a few players that have identical extra characters they've geared up to practice with. Same class, same talents, picking up the same gear. While the world of seeking world firsts is in its own dimension, I'm not sure the gating helped. Seems it just made way for another case of "clever usage of game mechanics". These people won't stop trying anything to get their job done no matter what is put in their way. And it largely doesn't affect the other guilds behind them. Maybe if they put the limited tries on an accountwide basis there'd be no loopholes - but seriously, there's been enough silly band-aid fixes recently.
Nothing will be impossible or too hard for the guys at the front. For everyone else? My guild ain't the best of the best, but I daresay we're a decent bunch. Game is too easy? Game will always be beaten by those that try their furthest to do so. So far, the Lich King has proven to be a fun, challenging and immersive encounter for us. And likely the same for everyone else at our level or those that raid more casually. The majority, in other words, the target group of player Blizzard has tried so hard to balance the game around this expansion. I'd say they succeeded in finding the difficulty to an okay level here in the end tier of this expansion. I hope whatever awaits us in Cataclysm will be worth the wait.
Friday, February 12, 2010
How does that sound?
Ever since getting out of an accident with one ear next to deaf, I learned to appreciate music on a whole new level. It's funny in its own sense how only first once you realize you may lose something forever, you understand how important or amazing something is to you. Music, sound, anything, my appreciation for it runs pretty much endlessly and as such I nowadays can listen to any genres or types.
While the world of sound is immense, of course there are some things that everyone will take a liking to. Game soundtracks in particular has over the recent years become more and more popular as an accepted culture of actual music and subgenre for most classic ones - and one particular site, namely OverClocked Remix, got a rich community that actively composes, edits and shares remixes of about anything from the gaming world. You could see this as a highlight to the site and what it offers, but I really do love most projects that get uploaded.
Latest addition is a Wave Race 64 main theme remix and whilst I barely remember this tune from all the years ago I played my Nintendo 64 console it's still an enjoyable track to listen to. About anything offered on OC Remix is, really. The first thing I did when getting my new computer and obtaining more storage space than I ever can fill up was download everything offered on the site. If you like game soundtracks in general you ought to check it out if you haven't. Usually when streaming playing WoW, I run a shuffle of all songs from OCR in the background.
While the world of sound is immense, of course there are some things that everyone will take a liking to. Game soundtracks in particular has over the recent years become more and more popular as an accepted culture of actual music and subgenre for most classic ones - and one particular site, namely OverClocked Remix, got a rich community that actively composes, edits and shares remixes of about anything from the gaming world. You could see this as a highlight to the site and what it offers, but I really do love most projects that get uploaded.
Latest addition is a Wave Race 64 main theme remix and whilst I barely remember this tune from all the years ago I played my Nintendo 64 console it's still an enjoyable track to listen to. About anything offered on OC Remix is, really. The first thing I did when getting my new computer and obtaining more storage space than I ever can fill up was download everything offered on the site. If you like game soundtracks in general you ought to check it out if you haven't. Usually when streaming playing WoW, I run a shuffle of all songs from OCR in the background.
Raid achievements now and in Cataclysm
So yesterday I had some trouble to get a bit of rest, but thankfully I was on backup for the raid in the evening so I decided to take a nap after the attendance points were handed out (and of course I slept for eight hours instead). Took a quick peek at how the raid had gone for the guild when I woke up and noticed they'd done the achievement for Professor Putricide (in conjunction with letting our dps warrior complete the Shadowmourne questline infusions, I believe) and it reminded me of the coming guild achievement system in Cataclysm.
Achievements. Yeah. It was a neat addition to give more depth to the game for those that wish to pursue them. In my case, I got very few of them left to complete that I can do on my own, and the biggest bunch of them that I lack comes from under the Dungeons and Raids tab. Whilst the achievements in themselves are often intuitive ideas, the design of them in conjunction with larger groups needed to complete the necessary steps feels flawed. I'm not one to say the entire achievement system should be able to be tackled by you alone - if anything the 5-man content is definitely fitting there. But the raids. Say you don't attend the one raid the group decides to do that problematic or annoying achievement, and the likelihood of it being repeated gets much lower. This isn't the fault of the guild, the group, or the leadership really. It's more along the lines how it doesn't flow as well together with how achievements work. In general, I think integrating most (if not all) raid group based achievements into the guild achievement system would be ideal. This way, even if you couldn't attend or simply couldn't get a spot that one time, it'd still show up for you and you could feel you contributed towards it in the greater picture.
The absolutely best example here would probably be the Realm First feats of strength. A title for the guild if you do the stuff first on your server. That's great, a motivating reward for working towards a goal. The problem? Of course all of the guild want to contribute, show their worth and feel they took part of it. As it is now, only the 25 individuals in the raid get credit for it - while I don't blame the design something tells me these achievements would be better off being credited to the guild as a whole within its own personal system.
The bottomline is that I'm not advocating for all raidbased achievements to be tied to the guild achievement system, or that the "default system" is meant to be beaten by you alone. However, the inherent design of them should in the long run perhaps benefit and make more people happy if it was credited in a different way. Of course I see some issues this would cause - like what about new recruits joining the guild? Would they unlock titles, (points?), and such right away? Would they need to partake in X actions together with other players from the guild before being eligible, or would it perhaps be some sort of system like where different guildranks can allow different levels of access to the guildbank? Would they lose it all if they left the guild? Probably. Who knows. In any case, I believe it's an interesting thought.
Achievements. Yeah. It was a neat addition to give more depth to the game for those that wish to pursue them. In my case, I got very few of them left to complete that I can do on my own, and the biggest bunch of them that I lack comes from under the Dungeons and Raids tab. Whilst the achievements in themselves are often intuitive ideas, the design of them in conjunction with larger groups needed to complete the necessary steps feels flawed. I'm not one to say the entire achievement system should be able to be tackled by you alone - if anything the 5-man content is definitely fitting there. But the raids. Say you don't attend the one raid the group decides to do that problematic or annoying achievement, and the likelihood of it being repeated gets much lower. This isn't the fault of the guild, the group, or the leadership really. It's more along the lines how it doesn't flow as well together with how achievements work. In general, I think integrating most (if not all) raid group based achievements into the guild achievement system would be ideal. This way, even if you couldn't attend or simply couldn't get a spot that one time, it'd still show up for you and you could feel you contributed towards it in the greater picture.
The absolutely best example here would probably be the Realm First feats of strength. A title for the guild if you do the stuff first on your server. That's great, a motivating reward for working towards a goal. The problem? Of course all of the guild want to contribute, show their worth and feel they took part of it. As it is now, only the 25 individuals in the raid get credit for it - while I don't blame the design something tells me these achievements would be better off being credited to the guild as a whole within its own personal system.
The bottomline is that I'm not advocating for all raidbased achievements to be tied to the guild achievement system, or that the "default system" is meant to be beaten by you alone. However, the inherent design of them should in the long run perhaps benefit and make more people happy if it was credited in a different way. Of course I see some issues this would cause - like what about new recruits joining the guild? Would they unlock titles, (points?), and such right away? Would they need to partake in X actions together with other players from the guild before being eligible, or would it perhaps be some sort of system like where different guildranks can allow different levels of access to the guildbank? Would they lose it all if they left the guild? Probably. Who knows. In any case, I believe it's an interesting thought.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
First?
... that's what they say on the forumboards whenever something important or interesting pops up and they're the first poster. Is this important or interesting? Probably not. But everything needs a first post.
Restlessness is a funny state. It drives you to explore new depths and try different things - almost as an unconscious motivation of moving onward and evolving as a human being by learning (or breaking) grounds that are unknown to you. In my case, the gaze fell on blogs. Having read and followed its evolution over the years, it's been a fascinating ride to see the level of popularity it has reached in our day. The freedom and variety of them seem to attract people of all backgrounds and reasons together for one thing - to share with others whatever they decide to dedicated their blog to. In my case, the main focus would fall on what I spend most my gaming hours on - World of Warcraft. Just another in the crowd of the other millions sure, but everyone is their own individual.
I'd like to branch out to the rest of my fields of interests of what is covered here though - because the problem I see with many blogs is that its owners narrow down the subjects to such a thin level they rarely have much to blog and update about. As a result, they update it only actively the first weeks when they got a lot of things to express themselves about with as a headstart, and then it gets increasingly more difficult to find relevant and/or interesting topics (all this maybe eventually leading to a dead blog).
Widening your views and being open to share more options will hopefully be a helpful hand in making the difference between an active and a dead blogpage.
Restlessness is a funny state. It drives you to explore new depths and try different things - almost as an unconscious motivation of moving onward and evolving as a human being by learning (or breaking) grounds that are unknown to you. In my case, the gaze fell on blogs. Having read and followed its evolution over the years, it's been a fascinating ride to see the level of popularity it has reached in our day. The freedom and variety of them seem to attract people of all backgrounds and reasons together for one thing - to share with others whatever they decide to dedicated their blog to. In my case, the main focus would fall on what I spend most my gaming hours on - World of Warcraft. Just another in the crowd of the other millions sure, but everyone is their own individual.
I'd like to branch out to the rest of my fields of interests of what is covered here though - because the problem I see with many blogs is that its owners narrow down the subjects to such a thin level they rarely have much to blog and update about. As a result, they update it only actively the first weeks when they got a lot of things to express themselves about with as a headstart, and then it gets increasingly more difficult to find relevant and/or interesting topics (all this maybe eventually leading to a dead blog).
Widening your views and being open to share more options will hopefully be a helpful hand in making the difference between an active and a dead blogpage.
