Ever since I saw the first player-recorded WoW videos, I thought the concept was fun. Unfortunately I was plagued throughout the years of either riding the fine line of having just about enough hardware power to just play the game or less, and it wasn't really an active project after trying and miserably lagging to pieces a couple of times.
Early in this year I decided to screw everything that was saving pennies and bought hardware with little to no holding back on the economic side. After some issues of riding on a very outdated bios version, I now got everything running perfectly and found I could run fraps recording with everything at highest quality. So I decided to give it a shot and see how it panned out with no real prior experience of editing whatsoever. Too bad Youtube butchers quality hard - my test video of a crappy Saurfang kill even after all processing looks pretty shanky at HD quality. But eh, you have to start somewhere.
Offnote: You really ought to watch it in HD to make out something meaningful of what's going on in the video.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Monday, April 19, 2010
Recap: Four weeks of progress
Time waits for no one, and this rings true without exceptions. I've been meant to post a few new entries for a while, and generally the problem isn't getting the text down or finding a theme for each update - it's rather the time of moving it from the unformatted notepad stage onto here and finalizing it into a somewhat readable piece of information. As such hopefully in general the coming updates may be a bit more closely posted (perhaps even to the point you wouldn't call me a slack-hobby-blogger) but that's not really important. It's of course fun for me to have readers but it was originally not the intent at all, I merely put up this simple basic page during a period of extreme apathy and decided to stick with it and update whenever I felt I wanted to. What strikes me as a problem for blogs I on occasion glance at is how once most of their owners gets a decent number of followers they feel a pressure to update - not because they got something to say or want to do it, but because they feel they have to do it. To be fair, this isn't what I envision a blogpage to be. Then it's more like a newspage. While that is nice in its own sense, it's not necessarily what most, and definitely not all, blogs are about.
But enough of that! As a guild we've had some incredible progress the past month, now sitting on 11/12 in heroic mode in Icecrown Citadel and having completed the frost wyrm meta achievement for the place as well (funnily before any of us got the 10-man one done, wonder how often that occurs?) Because of the sheer wall of text it'd procure to just put it all together, I'm going to break it down into a per-boss basis mainly focusing on the two harder encounters before Lich King himself: Sindragosa and Professor Putricide.
Sindragosa was, no matter how I try to see it, the hardest boss for us so far in the instance maybe tied with Lady Deathwhisper (and to be honest, most of the problems on her shouldn't have been occuring at all) even surpassing heroic Professor - I'll go into more detail on this later. What I can say about Sindra in particular is that it became apparent after just one try that this is a boss where there truly is little room for error, even with the buffet of the zone buff. Beating the enrage timer for something hasn't ever been a real issue for us as a guild, and this wasn't any exception either. The problem seems to most commonly either be breaking down to
1) Tanks dying
2) Other people dying
Which, when I think about it, summarizes the issue of wiping in a raid on anything...
Either way, the biggest changes from normal mode are mainly that the anti-caster debuff, Unchained Magic, does AoE explosions when instability stacks go off. As a result, there's a lot more micromanagement in both casting, positions, and most importantly: healing assignments. I can tell you this; I'm truly happy I'm not a healer anymore and keeping up with some crazy surrounding overview and ludicrously quickly needed switches in roles. Big props to our healers and the stuff they manage to pull off really - I may question everyone's play sometimes but then I remember I'd hate to be in your position and do what do you do.
Other things are details like one more frost tomb during air phases, and the fact the frost bombs dropping on the ground will one-shot anyone hit by it. It took a lot of combat-resses and patience to make sure everyone followed the concept of Line of Sight on at least some of the tries, but in the end it worked out fine.
Last phase with the magic buffet and hiding behind tombs is a lot more stressy. There's the instability dealing light aoe damage that may go off at one or two stacks in the raid, the stacking frost damage debuff from swinging at the boss, the boss' damaging aura, and the fact the magic buffet stacks increase the damage done by all these. I find myself casting a lot of heals on myself in this fight, in particular during last phase and when I need to stop attacking to drop my Chilled to the Bone stacks. It's nice though when an encounter design's difficulty goes on the point you'll start to resort to using things you under normal circumstances wouldn't have time or thought to deploy, and as long as everyone's aware of the situation for each individual I believe this is a great way to give the raiding scene more depth on occasion.
The fun thing is, after a couple of progress nights on her we eventually scored a kill - with no deaths. None. We didn't even have to combat-res someone, nobody died at any point at all. Now, of course the concept of "Nobody dying, and the raid doing enough dps" is all that you need in theory to beat an encounter, first kills very rarely go off on such a smooth level as this.
Now, Professor Putricide. While the boss' design inherently is terribly annoying for a ret paladin with all its endless target switches, the boss in heroic mode got such interesting twists that it still becomes one of the better experiences in the place.
So what's different? First off, there's an additional element to the fight called Unbound Plague that needs to be handled without fail or somebody dies. If you've ever done the Rotting Frost Giant weekly quest inside ICC, you'll remember that he casts a debuff that lasts for a few seconds and once it runs out, it kills you - so you need to pass it on to someone else before it runs out and in the process of doing so you become immune to receiving it again for a period. In the case of heroic Putricide, it's somewhat reversed when you pass it on. You will still die from the ticks after around 10 seconds, but when you pass it on you get a debuff that increases the damage taken from the ticks by 250%. This debuff also stacks infinitely. To handle this, we've used an addon that marks the player with the plague with a skull, and marks three other close players without the weakness debuff as possible candidates to pass it to. This needs to effectively be handled throughout the entire fight, albeit the nuke phase at the end can be done with just letting the plague jump indefinitely between melee as they won't leave the area they are in before the boss is dead.
Secondly, at the phase changes of 80% and 35%, he doesn't stun the raid with Tear Gas. Instead, he spawns one of each ooze while remaining passive himself at the lab table for 30 seconds. Half the raid will get a debuff each; one that only allows you to hurt the orange ooze, and the other that restricts you to damaging the green one. This is completely random who gets what, so if you're unlucky all healers and tanks could get one color and it'd be extremely tight to kill it. Also, these debuffs does not restrict the other colored ooze from performing it's chasing conditions on you: the orange one can still chase someone with the green debuff and the green ooze can still root someone with the orange one.
The biggest part about this boss early on was the ridiculously tight enrage timer. Not the direct 10 minutes hard enrage, but rather the phase three one with the debuffs stacking on the tanks. Even with the zone buff, we were hard pressed at the end running with 3 tanks, sitting on what I believe is 3 stacks, 3 stacks, 2 stacks at the time of the boss' death. And compared to normal, it's without doubt a wipe if a tank ever dies. Regardless, once we got the basics down and most of it came to raw dps numbers I felt this boss was easier than Sindragosa's level of micromanagement from most players in the raid. This is sadly also probably why our favorite Professor will be far too zergable at lvl85 in Cataclysm compared to some other bosses in the instance.
All in all, I feel we've been very productive recently. I'm not a very competetive person by nature and prefer the way we do things at our own pace with a lighter schedule than most raiding guilds, but it's sure fun when you do manage to keep up the good work at a quite good level. We killed Putricide at world 386 or something - which when you think about it is quite good when put side by side with the sheer number of guilds and players in general that play the game. Let's keep up the steam for heroic Lich King, boys and girls!
Random screenshots:
Lady Deathwhisper
Sindragosa
Frostwyrms!
But enough of that! As a guild we've had some incredible progress the past month, now sitting on 11/12 in heroic mode in Icecrown Citadel and having completed the frost wyrm meta achievement for the place as well (funnily before any of us got the 10-man one done, wonder how often that occurs?) Because of the sheer wall of text it'd procure to just put it all together, I'm going to break it down into a per-boss basis mainly focusing on the two harder encounters before Lich King himself: Sindragosa and Professor Putricide.
Sindragosa was, no matter how I try to see it, the hardest boss for us so far in the instance maybe tied with Lady Deathwhisper (and to be honest, most of the problems on her shouldn't have been occuring at all) even surpassing heroic Professor - I'll go into more detail on this later. What I can say about Sindra in particular is that it became apparent after just one try that this is a boss where there truly is little room for error, even with the buffet of the zone buff. Beating the enrage timer for something hasn't ever been a real issue for us as a guild, and this wasn't any exception either. The problem seems to most commonly either be breaking down to
1) Tanks dying
2) Other people dying
Which, when I think about it, summarizes the issue of wiping in a raid on anything...
Either way, the biggest changes from normal mode are mainly that the anti-caster debuff, Unchained Magic, does AoE explosions when instability stacks go off. As a result, there's a lot more micromanagement in both casting, positions, and most importantly: healing assignments. I can tell you this; I'm truly happy I'm not a healer anymore and keeping up with some crazy surrounding overview and ludicrously quickly needed switches in roles. Big props to our healers and the stuff they manage to pull off really - I may question everyone's play sometimes but then I remember I'd hate to be in your position and do what do you do.
Other things are details like one more frost tomb during air phases, and the fact the frost bombs dropping on the ground will one-shot anyone hit by it. It took a lot of combat-resses and patience to make sure everyone followed the concept of Line of Sight on at least some of the tries, but in the end it worked out fine.
Last phase with the magic buffet and hiding behind tombs is a lot more stressy. There's the instability dealing light aoe damage that may go off at one or two stacks in the raid, the stacking frost damage debuff from swinging at the boss, the boss' damaging aura, and the fact the magic buffet stacks increase the damage done by all these. I find myself casting a lot of heals on myself in this fight, in particular during last phase and when I need to stop attacking to drop my Chilled to the Bone stacks. It's nice though when an encounter design's difficulty goes on the point you'll start to resort to using things you under normal circumstances wouldn't have time or thought to deploy, and as long as everyone's aware of the situation for each individual I believe this is a great way to give the raiding scene more depth on occasion.
The fun thing is, after a couple of progress nights on her we eventually scored a kill - with no deaths. None. We didn't even have to combat-res someone, nobody died at any point at all. Now, of course the concept of "Nobody dying, and the raid doing enough dps" is all that you need in theory to beat an encounter, first kills very rarely go off on such a smooth level as this.
Now, Professor Putricide. While the boss' design inherently is terribly annoying for a ret paladin with all its endless target switches, the boss in heroic mode got such interesting twists that it still becomes one of the better experiences in the place.
So what's different? First off, there's an additional element to the fight called Unbound Plague that needs to be handled without fail or somebody dies. If you've ever done the Rotting Frost Giant weekly quest inside ICC, you'll remember that he casts a debuff that lasts for a few seconds and once it runs out, it kills you - so you need to pass it on to someone else before it runs out and in the process of doing so you become immune to receiving it again for a period. In the case of heroic Putricide, it's somewhat reversed when you pass it on. You will still die from the ticks after around 10 seconds, but when you pass it on you get a debuff that increases the damage taken from the ticks by 250%. This debuff also stacks infinitely. To handle this, we've used an addon that marks the player with the plague with a skull, and marks three other close players without the weakness debuff as possible candidates to pass it to. This needs to effectively be handled throughout the entire fight, albeit the nuke phase at the end can be done with just letting the plague jump indefinitely between melee as they won't leave the area they are in before the boss is dead.
Secondly, at the phase changes of 80% and 35%, he doesn't stun the raid with Tear Gas. Instead, he spawns one of each ooze while remaining passive himself at the lab table for 30 seconds. Half the raid will get a debuff each; one that only allows you to hurt the orange ooze, and the other that restricts you to damaging the green one. This is completely random who gets what, so if you're unlucky all healers and tanks could get one color and it'd be extremely tight to kill it. Also, these debuffs does not restrict the other colored ooze from performing it's chasing conditions on you: the orange one can still chase someone with the green debuff and the green ooze can still root someone with the orange one.
The biggest part about this boss early on was the ridiculously tight enrage timer. Not the direct 10 minutes hard enrage, but rather the phase three one with the debuffs stacking on the tanks. Even with the zone buff, we were hard pressed at the end running with 3 tanks, sitting on what I believe is 3 stacks, 3 stacks, 2 stacks at the time of the boss' death. And compared to normal, it's without doubt a wipe if a tank ever dies. Regardless, once we got the basics down and most of it came to raw dps numbers I felt this boss was easier than Sindragosa's level of micromanagement from most players in the raid. This is sadly also probably why our favorite Professor will be far too zergable at lvl85 in Cataclysm compared to some other bosses in the instance.
All in all, I feel we've been very productive recently. I'm not a very competetive person by nature and prefer the way we do things at our own pace with a lighter schedule than most raiding guilds, but it's sure fun when you do manage to keep up the good work at a quite good level. We killed Putricide at world 386 or something - which when you think about it is quite good when put side by side with the sheer number of guilds and players in general that play the game. Let's keep up the steam for heroic Lich King, boys and girls!
Random screenshots:
Lady Deathwhisper
Sindragosa
Frostwyrms!
Monday, March 22, 2010
Gamer's confessions: My path to today
WARNING! Wall of text!
And disclaimer! I've not looked over this text so it's definitely full of spelling/grammar errors. I'm sure it's readable anyway, at least.
Some things tend to nag at my mind on occasion and linger in the background over periods of time, brooding over time and when I can relax. It often manifests itself as a flowing text in my mind - where I can read the words and letters infront of me as a recital of a play that I myself directed unconsciously. Such as now - trying to sleep, and instead seeing text flow on in infinity. Get up and write? It sure felt like the only decision to slow down thoughts a little.
World of Warcraft was after the first months I played it firstmost a social game. When it was released, I had just gotten broadband connection in my neighbourhood and those I considered friends and socialized with at school and whatever were going to give it a shot. I had played the strategy games, I had loved and played Starcraft and Diablo to bits, it was made by Blizzard, the same company. I decided to give it a try.
I was completely new to MMO's, and to some extent on personal grounds, the internet. My friends picked Horde and a server, so I followed their footsteps. I made an Undead Priest on Al'Akir at launch - and named it Minella after my Amazon from Diablo 2 because I thought it sounded nice. Why did I pick undead? Not sure anymore. Seemed most interesting and unique coming from having played Warcraft 3 for years. Why Priest? No one else of the ones I knew made a healer role... and I had never given it a super serious try in a RPG before. My favorite class-type had always been archers before WoW, but Hunter just didn't appeal to me after trying it in the beta earlier.
As such I started up the game (I of course bought a collector's edition because I felt like I would regret it later if I didn't), completely clueless about pretty much anything than the absolutely roughest basics. I wasn't hearing impaired yet at this point... and I had very little music stored on my computer aside of the first netradio station I was introduced to during Dreamhack Summer 2004. Still to this day I vividly remember the background music, the ambience, the sound effects and all inbetween of the game. It was incredibly immersive and I really loved it to an extent surpassing that of all other games I had played before.
I didn't really know what a talent was. I saved items that had nice names. I explored the land around me in fascination, I got stuck in stonetalon mountains far far into the zone at like lvl10 due to blindly following a road leading through a beautiful landscape. I also remember doing my first Wailing Caverns instance, the first dungeon I ever did... pretty sure I rolled on green items with agility and stuff because I had never really seen a green item before except a handful from quests. Did I heal? Yeah, and wanded. I thought wands were amazing, magic that didn't cost mana and had cool different elemental types! Surely must've pissed off some MMO veterans if I ran into them... to be fair I don't remember ever being nerdraged at, at least not that early in the game. Had some weird talent choices, and kept healing as shadow up to right under lvl50.
Back here I was really young, 16 when the european realms went up. Naive to the internet (that was still decently young at this point) I kept my attitude towards normal single player RPG's with me - trying to be nice to anyone and everyone. It earned me respect in dungeon groups and random people I met I think, everyone always said "nice playing with you, added you to my friends!" and remember I always felt really happy about it! Game took a kind of fun twist when I got whispered by a complete stranger if I wanted to heal a high level instance called BRD - Blackrock Depths. I had been there once before... and we were lost in the early prison district forever until group broke up for some reason I don't remember. Didn't have to heal that one time I remember, and instead did damage (I was shadow too, after all). I explained to the stranger that I was shadow and wasn't very confident I could heal that place as it. He, in some way, managed to convince me to try anyway and I joined the group there. We managed the start decently, but it was disastrous later on. I stoned back and did my first ever respec. I hadn't ever healed before, had no idea what talents to pick, so I randomly made some holy spec and picked the nice regeneration talents in shadow as well, and got summoned back. It went awesomely well after that! Barely had to use waters, kept everyone alive, we ventured really far in and I saw amazing amounts of bosses and interesting items drop. Blackrock Depths remains my favorite dungeon in the game to this day... it was a true DUNGEON. Nonlinear. Huge. Lots of different ways and directions, a very cryptic interior and (at that time) very interesting and unique design.
I remained holy after that. Reached the last levels, don't remember how long it took, but I spent ages in the plaguelands zones and loved it. When I was 55+, my friends had since long turned 60 on their characters and ran weirdly named dungeons and joined a guild together. They went to this place called Molten Core, a RAID, an even bigger dungeon where you need FORTY players! This was really hard for me to fathom still, I went to read about it and learned of how it worked. I got into the guild they were in - healers were incredibly rare this early in the game. Hell, I even got to join into Molten Core at lvl57! I can't have had above 2500 health with full raidbuffs, died to random things but generally managed to do my part. Saw Lucifron, Magmadar and onward, used voice communication for the first time, and it was fun hearing stranger's voices. But already at this early point, I felt some things were wrong in some sense.
Not sure where things started go in the wrong direction... but I ended up in a lot of disagreement with my 'friends'. One of them, the youngest, had absolutely no remorse about ninjalooting and being incredibly rude in instance parties and made huge fusses over epic loot in MC. Another started to pvp fulltime - which I was incredibly afraid of still at this point (early EU release, Al'Akir's total player population consisted of 40% rogues from surveys, and they all kept ganking me when I was levelling :( ). The others in the guild we were in increasingly became too fussed over the same things, and at some point I just couldn't bother seeing all the disputes and left. By this time I had picked up basic molten core equipment and was presented to easily be able to join any other guilds. I tried what was back in that day a largely slavic guild - Kalevlased, and healed my way through MC again. This was back in the day when T2 were rare drops from MC bosses and Onyxia, I think I got my transcendence robes from Ony... but my memory may fail me.
BWL came out. We did the first stuff there. Halfway through the instance, the guild had started to become very much like the one I was in before though, with crazy loot drama over every single piece we looted anywhere. All this unfriendliness must've gotten to me at some point, along with the fact I just couldn't get along ingame with those I socialized with real life. Most had actually at this point already rerolled, either just character or server. I followed a couple in my class briefly onto Stormreaver, but gave up when they rerolled once again. It was incredibly annoying - how could these people just let everything go just like that? Did nothing they had achieved mean anything, the people they'd gotten to know have no importance to them? Frustrated I decided to just go play by myself somewhere, not restricted by the chains of people I knew - and created a gnome warlock on Argent Dawn, an RP realm. I named it Neimi, still to this day unsure how I came up with the name but it just came to me like that. I knew quite a bit about the game at this point, and also enjoyed experimenting myself forward with unorthodox solutions to cookiecutter ones. Got into some small guild somewhere, via the contact of a person I got to know on a non-game-related forum. It was fun, I was playing the other faction for the first time as well, and knowing how problematic my first levelling experience was I was quick to jump to help others and explain and give directions. The guildmaster guy eventually gave me my own guildrank, Loremaster! I felt kind of proud, because I had made a difference for other players and it was very enjoyable to play with them. In the guild, was a guy playing a gnome rogue called Ellybell that I ended up doing silly stuff with - like running Razorfen Downs with him as tank... a rogue. Yeah.
Small leap forward in time - as everything no good thing lasts forever. The guildmaster got involved in something scandalous that I have only faint memories of and a lot of drama ensued. Me and Ellybell along with some others joined another guild but there was never any real motivation that drove us anywhere at this point I believe. One day, however, he told me about a roleplaying guild project that would be started up on one of the new up-coming RP-PvP realm type; called Second Gurubashi Empire. We registered at their site and joined up with the project pre-realm-launch and the day Defias Brotherhood was started up, September 14th 2005, I, at least, largely left AD behind me.
I had never experienced a true server launch before (I fooled around too much and missed first days at Al'Akir) and it was overwhelming and fresh. And the sense of community from the first moment was great! I had picked a rogue this time, a female troll, I named it Shaorin (after an anime character I thought was very cute back then, shoot me...) and levelled up on a realm where there was an iron fist on the RP concept from first moment. Some were defiant and trying to ridicule it already from start, but they got flattened by the masses striving to protect it.
Ellybell didn't get along with the GM of the guild. Infact, I kind of felt it from the start even before the realm was up. I was around lvl50 I believe when they got into a big argument and he left. He later joined another guild called Burning Dawn; a huge project made by some veteran mofo from AD's sister realm Earthen Ring that had big aspirations of itself.
Zul'Gurub patch had been deployed at the point I hit 60 along with most other people, and after the basic dungeon crawling period it was strikingly apparent that a RP guild alone couldn't manage a raid force by itself and be successful. People got bored, many left, many always complained about it but never did anything real to try fix it. A group of real life buddies I befriended on the way wanted to raid as well - but they weren't too many. Together with them, we reached out to other small RP guilds and tried to unite them for an allied effort into getting some raiding done. The guildmaster of our guild... well, how should I put it. Would be fun if he read this probably. It's just hard to put in words how he was as person - but basically he didn't do much except talking about leadership and was incredibly passive, much to my surprise as he seemed very charismatic in text at first. Later on, many on the realm's both factions got to learn about this as well... but that's another story for another time. We had a lot of disputes. He wanted priority on raid spots, on both tank gear and dps gear (because he was guildleader, of course) and when the small RL friend group's leader, who had done his utmost to get every single best tanking items pre-raiding, got appointed our maintank, he was outraged. He threatened me and the other officers to disband the guild if we didn't make him the real maintank by the time we started Molten Core after he kept winning tanking items inside ZG. Overlord's Crimson Band... the object that would drive him crazy. First, he started to backtalk me and the other officers to the rest of guild and server, blackmailing us in trade channel and similar, ranting about the dirty backstabbers we were. When he received no real sympathy from the guild, he left. He kept raging and blamed us, mostly me, for it. With him gone, we went on with the raid alliance and involved a couple more guilds, including two that got along with together quite nicely - Cult of the Void and The Orphans Grim. We named the raid alliance Ironcollar, and successfully cleared ZG, killed Onyxia, and cleared MC up to Ragnaros. Then the disputes started here as well. Some of the guilds within the alliance didn't get along too well with each other, and in the end CotV and ToG broke up to raid together alone. Looking back, I don't really blame them.
This, however, completely crippled Ironcollar and even after a few valiant efforts to try re-ignite it the glory days were over. People complained about no raiding. I was holding the GM title out-of-character-wise at this time, and it really started burdening me down. It all felt so unthankful - I had tried to do all this organization just for -them- to get a shot at this stuff. And I didn't get any help from them at the end, just whining. After running into drama like that again, which I had gone to this realm to avoid, I proclaimed that I may as well quit playing this game and informed Ellybell, now playing a character called Zo, about it.
He told me to apply to his guild instead. It was newly formed just some days ago, a splinter faction called Last Stand created from people breaking off Burning Dawn after their guildmaster had left them and rerolled alliance, leaving the guild completely taken by surprise and in the dust. The way leadership had been decided and everything related to it created massive disputes and held BD back, eventually leading to some officers leaving and creating their own guild. Most of BD followed and LS had been created. This guild I applied to and got in, my gear had been quite well shaped from the raid alliance sporting pretty much full MC gear and even packing Baron Geddon's Thunderfury binding in my backpack.
Last Stand introduced me to a whole new level of social community. I felt like part of it very fast, and had an amazing time! This post is already ridiculously long, so I'm going to take a massive leap in time.
Last Stand lasted from March 2006 to autumn 2009. I learned and experienced much within this timeframe, and saw my last character reroll at the TBC expansion launch into the paladin I still play to this day. I'll never forget you guys and girls, those of you that stayed to the bitter end, all those we saw come and go over the years, and everyone around us as well. I've just wanted to thank all of you for giving me such a great home for so many years, and even while a lot of you now have quit or are in the same guild as I am now, that's just an honest tribute I want to write down. You know you deserve it.
The original point of this post was about something else, but this is already too long. I'll let the original subject have its own post later on.
And disclaimer! I've not looked over this text so it's definitely full of spelling/grammar errors. I'm sure it's readable anyway, at least.
Some things tend to nag at my mind on occasion and linger in the background over periods of time, brooding over time and when I can relax. It often manifests itself as a flowing text in my mind - where I can read the words and letters infront of me as a recital of a play that I myself directed unconsciously. Such as now - trying to sleep, and instead seeing text flow on in infinity. Get up and write? It sure felt like the only decision to slow down thoughts a little.
World of Warcraft was after the first months I played it firstmost a social game. When it was released, I had just gotten broadband connection in my neighbourhood and those I considered friends and socialized with at school and whatever were going to give it a shot. I had played the strategy games, I had loved and played Starcraft and Diablo to bits, it was made by Blizzard, the same company. I decided to give it a try.
I was completely new to MMO's, and to some extent on personal grounds, the internet. My friends picked Horde and a server, so I followed their footsteps. I made an Undead Priest on Al'Akir at launch - and named it Minella after my Amazon from Diablo 2 because I thought it sounded nice. Why did I pick undead? Not sure anymore. Seemed most interesting and unique coming from having played Warcraft 3 for years. Why Priest? No one else of the ones I knew made a healer role... and I had never given it a super serious try in a RPG before. My favorite class-type had always been archers before WoW, but Hunter just didn't appeal to me after trying it in the beta earlier.
As such I started up the game (I of course bought a collector's edition because I felt like I would regret it later if I didn't), completely clueless about pretty much anything than the absolutely roughest basics. I wasn't hearing impaired yet at this point... and I had very little music stored on my computer aside of the first netradio station I was introduced to during Dreamhack Summer 2004. Still to this day I vividly remember the background music, the ambience, the sound effects and all inbetween of the game. It was incredibly immersive and I really loved it to an extent surpassing that of all other games I had played before.
I didn't really know what a talent was. I saved items that had nice names. I explored the land around me in fascination, I got stuck in stonetalon mountains far far into the zone at like lvl10 due to blindly following a road leading through a beautiful landscape. I also remember doing my first Wailing Caverns instance, the first dungeon I ever did... pretty sure I rolled on green items with agility and stuff because I had never really seen a green item before except a handful from quests. Did I heal? Yeah, and wanded. I thought wands were amazing, magic that didn't cost mana and had cool different elemental types! Surely must've pissed off some MMO veterans if I ran into them... to be fair I don't remember ever being nerdraged at, at least not that early in the game. Had some weird talent choices, and kept healing as shadow up to right under lvl50.
Back here I was really young, 16 when the european realms went up. Naive to the internet (that was still decently young at this point) I kept my attitude towards normal single player RPG's with me - trying to be nice to anyone and everyone. It earned me respect in dungeon groups and random people I met I think, everyone always said "nice playing with you, added you to my friends!" and remember I always felt really happy about it! Game took a kind of fun twist when I got whispered by a complete stranger if I wanted to heal a high level instance called BRD - Blackrock Depths. I had been there once before... and we were lost in the early prison district forever until group broke up for some reason I don't remember. Didn't have to heal that one time I remember, and instead did damage (I was shadow too, after all). I explained to the stranger that I was shadow and wasn't very confident I could heal that place as it. He, in some way, managed to convince me to try anyway and I joined the group there. We managed the start decently, but it was disastrous later on. I stoned back and did my first ever respec. I hadn't ever healed before, had no idea what talents to pick, so I randomly made some holy spec and picked the nice regeneration talents in shadow as well, and got summoned back. It went awesomely well after that! Barely had to use waters, kept everyone alive, we ventured really far in and I saw amazing amounts of bosses and interesting items drop. Blackrock Depths remains my favorite dungeon in the game to this day... it was a true DUNGEON. Nonlinear. Huge. Lots of different ways and directions, a very cryptic interior and (at that time) very interesting and unique design.
I remained holy after that. Reached the last levels, don't remember how long it took, but I spent ages in the plaguelands zones and loved it. When I was 55+, my friends had since long turned 60 on their characters and ran weirdly named dungeons and joined a guild together. They went to this place called Molten Core, a RAID, an even bigger dungeon where you need FORTY players! This was really hard for me to fathom still, I went to read about it and learned of how it worked. I got into the guild they were in - healers were incredibly rare this early in the game. Hell, I even got to join into Molten Core at lvl57! I can't have had above 2500 health with full raidbuffs, died to random things but generally managed to do my part. Saw Lucifron, Magmadar and onward, used voice communication for the first time, and it was fun hearing stranger's voices. But already at this early point, I felt some things were wrong in some sense.
Not sure where things started go in the wrong direction... but I ended up in a lot of disagreement with my 'friends'. One of them, the youngest, had absolutely no remorse about ninjalooting and being incredibly rude in instance parties and made huge fusses over epic loot in MC. Another started to pvp fulltime - which I was incredibly afraid of still at this point (early EU release, Al'Akir's total player population consisted of 40% rogues from surveys, and they all kept ganking me when I was levelling :( ). The others in the guild we were in increasingly became too fussed over the same things, and at some point I just couldn't bother seeing all the disputes and left. By this time I had picked up basic molten core equipment and was presented to easily be able to join any other guilds. I tried what was back in that day a largely slavic guild - Kalevlased, and healed my way through MC again. This was back in the day when T2 were rare drops from MC bosses and Onyxia, I think I got my transcendence robes from Ony... but my memory may fail me.
BWL came out. We did the first stuff there. Halfway through the instance, the guild had started to become very much like the one I was in before though, with crazy loot drama over every single piece we looted anywhere. All this unfriendliness must've gotten to me at some point, along with the fact I just couldn't get along ingame with those I socialized with real life. Most had actually at this point already rerolled, either just character or server. I followed a couple in my class briefly onto Stormreaver, but gave up when they rerolled once again. It was incredibly annoying - how could these people just let everything go just like that? Did nothing they had achieved mean anything, the people they'd gotten to know have no importance to them? Frustrated I decided to just go play by myself somewhere, not restricted by the chains of people I knew - and created a gnome warlock on Argent Dawn, an RP realm. I named it Neimi, still to this day unsure how I came up with the name but it just came to me like that. I knew quite a bit about the game at this point, and also enjoyed experimenting myself forward with unorthodox solutions to cookiecutter ones. Got into some small guild somewhere, via the contact of a person I got to know on a non-game-related forum. It was fun, I was playing the other faction for the first time as well, and knowing how problematic my first levelling experience was I was quick to jump to help others and explain and give directions. The guildmaster guy eventually gave me my own guildrank, Loremaster! I felt kind of proud, because I had made a difference for other players and it was very enjoyable to play with them. In the guild, was a guy playing a gnome rogue called Ellybell that I ended up doing silly stuff with - like running Razorfen Downs with him as tank... a rogue. Yeah.
Small leap forward in time - as everything no good thing lasts forever. The guildmaster got involved in something scandalous that I have only faint memories of and a lot of drama ensued. Me and Ellybell along with some others joined another guild but there was never any real motivation that drove us anywhere at this point I believe. One day, however, he told me about a roleplaying guild project that would be started up on one of the new up-coming RP-PvP realm type; called Second Gurubashi Empire. We registered at their site and joined up with the project pre-realm-launch and the day Defias Brotherhood was started up, September 14th 2005, I, at least, largely left AD behind me.
I had never experienced a true server launch before (I fooled around too much and missed first days at Al'Akir) and it was overwhelming and fresh. And the sense of community from the first moment was great! I had picked a rogue this time, a female troll, I named it Shaorin (after an anime character I thought was very cute back then, shoot me...) and levelled up on a realm where there was an iron fist on the RP concept from first moment. Some were defiant and trying to ridicule it already from start, but they got flattened by the masses striving to protect it.
Ellybell didn't get along with the GM of the guild. Infact, I kind of felt it from the start even before the realm was up. I was around lvl50 I believe when they got into a big argument and he left. He later joined another guild called Burning Dawn; a huge project made by some veteran mofo from AD's sister realm Earthen Ring that had big aspirations of itself.
Zul'Gurub patch had been deployed at the point I hit 60 along with most other people, and after the basic dungeon crawling period it was strikingly apparent that a RP guild alone couldn't manage a raid force by itself and be successful. People got bored, many left, many always complained about it but never did anything real to try fix it. A group of real life buddies I befriended on the way wanted to raid as well - but they weren't too many. Together with them, we reached out to other small RP guilds and tried to unite them for an allied effort into getting some raiding done. The guildmaster of our guild... well, how should I put it. Would be fun if he read this probably. It's just hard to put in words how he was as person - but basically he didn't do much except talking about leadership and was incredibly passive, much to my surprise as he seemed very charismatic in text at first. Later on, many on the realm's both factions got to learn about this as well... but that's another story for another time. We had a lot of disputes. He wanted priority on raid spots, on both tank gear and dps gear (because he was guildleader, of course) and when the small RL friend group's leader, who had done his utmost to get every single best tanking items pre-raiding, got appointed our maintank, he was outraged. He threatened me and the other officers to disband the guild if we didn't make him the real maintank by the time we started Molten Core after he kept winning tanking items inside ZG. Overlord's Crimson Band... the object that would drive him crazy. First, he started to backtalk me and the other officers to the rest of guild and server, blackmailing us in trade channel and similar, ranting about the dirty backstabbers we were. When he received no real sympathy from the guild, he left. He kept raging and blamed us, mostly me, for it. With him gone, we went on with the raid alliance and involved a couple more guilds, including two that got along with together quite nicely - Cult of the Void and The Orphans Grim. We named the raid alliance Ironcollar, and successfully cleared ZG, killed Onyxia, and cleared MC up to Ragnaros. Then the disputes started here as well. Some of the guilds within the alliance didn't get along too well with each other, and in the end CotV and ToG broke up to raid together alone. Looking back, I don't really blame them.
This, however, completely crippled Ironcollar and even after a few valiant efforts to try re-ignite it the glory days were over. People complained about no raiding. I was holding the GM title out-of-character-wise at this time, and it really started burdening me down. It all felt so unthankful - I had tried to do all this organization just for -them- to get a shot at this stuff. And I didn't get any help from them at the end, just whining. After running into drama like that again, which I had gone to this realm to avoid, I proclaimed that I may as well quit playing this game and informed Ellybell, now playing a character called Zo, about it.
He told me to apply to his guild instead. It was newly formed just some days ago, a splinter faction called Last Stand created from people breaking off Burning Dawn after their guildmaster had left them and rerolled alliance, leaving the guild completely taken by surprise and in the dust. The way leadership had been decided and everything related to it created massive disputes and held BD back, eventually leading to some officers leaving and creating their own guild. Most of BD followed and LS had been created. This guild I applied to and got in, my gear had been quite well shaped from the raid alliance sporting pretty much full MC gear and even packing Baron Geddon's Thunderfury binding in my backpack.
Last Stand introduced me to a whole new level of social community. I felt like part of it very fast, and had an amazing time! This post is already ridiculously long, so I'm going to take a massive leap in time.
Last Stand lasted from March 2006 to autumn 2009. I learned and experienced much within this timeframe, and saw my last character reroll at the TBC expansion launch into the paladin I still play to this day. I'll never forget you guys and girls, those of you that stayed to the bitter end, all those we saw come and go over the years, and everyone around us as well. I've just wanted to thank all of you for giving me such a great home for so many years, and even while a lot of you now have quit or are in the same guild as I am now, that's just an honest tribute I want to write down. You know you deserve it.
The original point of this post was about something else, but this is already too long. I'll let the original subject have its own post later on.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Past and present
Browsing through disks and my old laptop recently I came across screenshots dating from late 2006 into today. I had been under the belief they had all been lost back when my stationary PC crashed completely a couple of years ago, so it was a pleasant surprise to see there's some traces left of the journey up to where we are now. You surely evolve as player over the years - learning the basics, going through phases and changes on the way, people come and go and you improve your gameplay as you increasingly feel you can do it better.
I picked the oldest picture I could find from the past picturing my paladin, from January 17th, 2007, and then returned to the same place today on March 9th, 2010 to remake the picture. A jump from level 10 to 80.
Going through the images one by one is like reading an anthology of your gaming career. You can most of the time remember how the day you pressed print screen that time looked, what you were doing, how it ended, and what had already occured or would be about to happen. I'm not all too certain most players that have been around for multiple years can recall in this way, or even care about it, but I find it interesting to look back and see what you've done. There's a difference between being stuck in the past and being able to look back at it and smile - to remember the good and bad times and cherish them both equally.
The only thing more I can add regarding this is to remember to remove your rose-colored goggles if you decide to reflect on past deeds. And that isn't restricted to the game only. :)
I picked the oldest picture I could find from the past picturing my paladin, from January 17th, 2007, and then returned to the same place today on March 9th, 2010 to remake the picture. A jump from level 10 to 80.
Going through the images one by one is like reading an anthology of your gaming career. You can most of the time remember how the day you pressed print screen that time looked, what you were doing, how it ended, and what had already occured or would be about to happen. I'm not all too certain most players that have been around for multiple years can recall in this way, or even care about it, but I find it interesting to look back and see what you've done. There's a difference between being stuck in the past and being able to look back at it and smile - to remember the good and bad times and cherish them both equally.
The only thing more I can add regarding this is to remember to remove your rose-colored goggles if you decide to reflect on past deeds. And that isn't restricted to the game only. :)
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.
