Archive for May, 2008
Kil’Jaeden Is Dead; PvE Competition
4I’m of course late on this news, but this is more of an outlet for opinion than news. For those of you who haven’t heard, SK Gaming brought down Kil’Jaeden on Monday. So far, nine guilds have managed the feat (not including those who have not been updated on WoWProgress). SK has already posted a video of their kill. Nihilum came in third, losing their crown as the top raiding guild. And some members of Nihilum are a little bitter about it. I suppose that’s to be expected when you’re trying to retain sponsorships.
Reading Grandeath’s opinion, I agree with some of it. But there are also some points of contention.
“Failing Sucks”
[Nihilum] as a guild aim for world firsts all the time. And this time we failed – and it sucks! Just like it sucked for Jesse to fail with his car project. And I for one would love to take a minigun and pump the Sunwell full of bullets until there’s nothing left but a burning corpse.
This is akin to my guild having lost the server first to Illidan after achieving server firsts on every single boss in SSC, TK, Hyjal and BT, except Lurker and Illidan. What was so disappointing was the fact that we were so far ahead on our Archimonde kill, too. Lurker was no big deal. You could do the bosses in SSC in any order, except for Vashj. So it’s no surprise someone beat us on at least one boss in there. However, Illidan was rather a big deal. But then we considered exactly how we killed Illidan. Basically, the story goes as follows:
We had a good amount of practice on Illidan and felt we could achieve a kill that very week. It was just a matter of when we would obtain it. The second-place guild was also close to a kill, so it had become a race. One of our warrior tanks had become burned out on tanking and WoW in general, so he was unavailable to tank for us. That left us with three possible tanks: a protection paladin, a protection warrior, and a feral druid. The fact that we decided not to recruit more tanks while we were still pushing attunements a couple months before left us in a problematic position when it came time to push Illidan.
What compounded the problem, however, was that our paladin had stated that he would be crittable in his FR gear. And we believed this would have been certain death for a flame tank (especially because paladins hadn’t received their stamina buff yet, at the time). So what did we do? We decided to have him tank Illidan. At this point, while a protection paladin had tanked an Illidan kill before, none had tanked a guild’s progression kill before.
So we had some frustration regarding tank death on transitions between demon and human form in phase 3/4/5 (the “human/demon” and then “human/demon/trap” phases). The most problematic transition was that at 30%, when everyone is put in a bubble and all HoTs on the tank drop. This caused Teckbot to die a few times, due to a lack of last stand, LoH being on CD, etc. So the result? We lost the server first. We were beaten by an hour. However, we did obtain a world first by achieving a progression kill with a paladin tanking.
That said, after the kill had been accomplished, we realized Teck forgot to factor resilience into his crit calculations. So he actually would have been uncrittable as a flame tank. And this would have allowed us to use a protection warrior as the optimal tank for Illidan. And I’m rather confident we could have obtained the server first on him had we done this. But we didn’t, so this error in judgment and caused us to become the server’s second best guild at the time.
The above was not the only mistake we made, however. We also allowed poor players to retain their position within our raid. And we made some errors in our approach to recruitment. We should have recruited more people before ceasing our attunement efforts, giving us more bodies to allow us to persist all the way through the end of the content. We should have immediately gone back to TK and SSC when one of our tanks expressed a declining interest in tanking, instead of waiting until after Illidan was dead.
However, when I look back on it in retrospect, this fact runs through my mind: We were the first known guild in the world to achieve our progression kill with a protection paladin tanking. And this was back when paladins didn’t have as much stamina as they do now. That’s a big fucking deal! So, yes, failing sucks. But you should be able to come out of an experience with at least some positive notes.
“Like Butter Scraped Over Too Much Bread”
I see what you did there. A quote straight out of The Lord of the Rings.
From the first day Sunwell was released until Kil’jaeden was dead it took exactly 2 months. And how long did it take exactly to kill the bosses? It took 11 days total for all 6 bosses to go down for the first guild. 1 day to kill first three, 2 days to kill Twins, 4 days to kill M’uru and 4 days to kill Kil’jaeden. 11 days. 11 days of progress spread out over 2 months. A very dissapointing and boring experience. And as I’ve said before to the guild (and I know others feel the same): if the gate system or anything similar will be a part of future high end instances then I will go casual. It’s simply not worth it.
I agree that the gate system was unnecessary. The only fathomable reason I can devise for the gates’ existence was because Blizzard wanted to reduce the impact RNG mechanics of loot can have on a raid’s performance. Imagine a guild obtaining nothing but DPS gear for every single kill in their first weeks of Sunwell raiding. No doubt, if the guild was skilled and driven enough, they would have had the best shot at killing M’uru first. However, even with the gate system, the effects of RNG will still play their part.
The only way Blizzard could absolutely eliminate the effects of RNG is if bosses dropped the same loot every single time they died. This would likely mean a full-out token system in every regard. But reducing the looting system to nothing but tokens would likely cause the metagame factor of loot to be diminished. I know all of my healers get excited every time Memento of Tyrande drops. But, at the same time, it would likely cause the highlight of PvE to become the content itself, instead of loot. Blizzard seems to have compromised on this issue, and I’m not really sure which is better than the other.
Regardless, I think the gate system was unnecessary. RNG mechanics will factor in regardless, whether it’s loot, lag, or simply players having bad nights.
“The Hardest Instance So Far”
Even though they are hard and they have new mechanics or elements not seen before, how challenging were they really? While bosses get harder, guilds get better as well. Kil’jaeden went down in 4 days for the first guild, 6 days for Nihilum. Even though it’s a hard boss I can’t say I’m impressed. Also I’m dissapointed since I was hoping the fight would be more complicated, but even though it has multiple phases, it’s a pretty simple encounter. There’s only one phase in the fight that is really hard. Trust me, that phase is hard. :) But if you ace it, you basically win. Just as with other Sunwell fights like M’uru and Twins, everyone in the raid needs to ace his performance. One death most likely means a wipe. To sum it up, Sunwell is indeed a hard instance, but still a very dissapointing experience.
My opinion is the exact opposite. Not that I have fully experienced M’uru, and I certainly haven’t experienced Kil’Jaeden at all. But I’m speaking as someone who considers himself to be a good player in a great guild, however not as someone in a guild that spends nearly as much time as SK Gaming or Nihilum does on progression. I don’t raid sixteen hours a day until something is dead. Rather, I raid five hours for four days a week. That’s twenty hours a week total. We did add one Tuesday to our schedule in the first week of Sunwell’s release, but that’s been it so far. We might do that again when Kil’Jaeden is close to dying, but it’s too much to ask for certain key members of the guild to do it more often.
So, basically, my guild raids each week for about as much time as SK Gaming and Nihilum does in less than two days of progress. The equivalent of the four days spent for SK Gaming is about three and one-fifth weeks for my guild. And that doesn’t include the fact that we have to kill the first four bosses of Sunwell three more times to do that. Nor does it factor in the skill difference between SK Gaming and my own guild, which is more than likely very large. So that four days for SK Gaming actually turns into several weeks and several repeat kills of earlier bosses for us. So while it’s butter scraped over too much bread for a small handful of guilds, it’s certainly not for us. And that leaves me with an actual feeling of satisfaction, rather than disappointment. While Nihilum waited nine months for a short amount of content and the loss of their number one spot, my guild waited six for what has been, thus far, an extremely exciting and rewarding experience.
And regarding the difficulty, let’s consider insanely difficult console games. A small handful of players will play and play and play until that final boss is finally defeated. But most others will likely give up and simply obtain satisfaction merely in having tried. But the key point is that the decision is made to give up and move on. The root problem is that WoW isn’t a console game, and Blizzard can’t treat it like one. When a player gives up in WoW, it’s very bad news for Blizzard. It means a loss in revenue for server upkeep. It means Blizzard will have to eventually utilize manpower and resources to merge servers and downsize the operation of WoW, as players give up and leave. And you have to consider the fact that there are already guilds falling apart merely over the Eredar Twins. And while I don’t think they should be nerfed, I think it would be a mistake making encounters absolutely impossible for all but, say 0.01% of the population. At least Blizzard shouldn’t do so until they consciously decide the game is reaching the end of its life cycle. Not all guilds can ace encounters as well as those that have now killed Kil’Jaeden.
The only justification I can then see for making insanely difficult 25-man fights is the fact that the raid content will also have 10-man versions in Wrath of the Lich King. Instead of the 10-man instances being entirely different and separate from 25-man, there will be both versions for each raid dungeon. Defeating such content and experiencing the story is much more manageable, as it’s considerably easier to put in extra time on 10-man content for a 25-man guild. And Blizzard can choose to simply make the 10-man versions easier. But the 25-man content could still potentially frustrate some guilds, so you have to question whether or not its worth it. But I do think Arthas should be slightly more difficult than the avatar of Kil’Jaeden.
“Blizzard vs Raiders”
9 months of nothing after Black Temple and Sunwell is what you deliver… Very dissapointing from the endgame raider’s point of view. 6 bosses. Compare that to when MH/BT were released – 5 bosses in Mount Hyjal, 9 bosses in Black Temple, 14 bosses in total, more than twice the amount of Sunwell.
The quality of the encounters in Hyjal and BT was relatively diminished compared to Sunwell. For Sunwell, it seems to me that five of the six encounters are top notch (I don’t like the Twins, so I’m not going to include it; though K’J is just a guess). For Hyjal and BT, I think only Archimonde, Teron, Gurtogg, Shahraz, and Illidan come close to being high in quality. But in terms of difficulty? They don’t come close to Sunwell. I think Brutallus is more difficult than Illidan. Hell, I think the first killable version of Kael’thas was more difficult, even. So Sunwell, as a whole, is of much higher quality, in my opinion. Better I wait nine months for that than six months for another Hyjal and BT.
I think the fact of the matter remains that raiders are going to defeat content faster than Blizzard can simply produce it. And faster production lowers the quality. It would be similar to asking Nintendo to put out a new Zelda game every six months, because players beat each in the first week or two. It’s just simply not going to happen. And I’d rather have a quality experience every nine months than a terrible experience every few. I know some people will disagree, but it’s funny considering people complained how BT was relatively easy and called for something more difficult. And now that something more difficult and higher in quality has been produced, people are complaining about the time it took to produce it. It’s a huge cliché, but: “You can’t please everyone.”
Some people might say that this is QQ from elitist raiders, that Blizzard is right about caring more for the majority of players that don’t raid Sunwell and spending time on developing for them instead.
Damn straight.
But in my opinion the top raiders are needed in many ways. There’s a strong culture around it. There are a lot of players out there who might only do low end instances but are interested in top guilds, look up to them and hope that one day they can join a top guild.
The keyword is hope. There’s how many spots for how many people? Very few spots for tons and tons of people. No matter how easy or difficult the content is, people will always look up to the top guilds, regardless of who they are and who quits. When Death and Taxes ceased to be number one, people started looking up to Nihilum. And just as Nihilum is no longer number one, people now look up to SK Gaming. When and if SK Gaming falls apart, people will find a new top guild to look up to, regardless of who at the top quits or becomes frustrated.
If Blizzard destroys the competitive high end PVE culture in WoW, they will destroy more than they think and indirectly they will lose more players than the minority that does high end PvE, trust me.
I don’t think there’s anything they can do to destroy it other than to make every single instance as easy and boring as, say, Molten Core. As long as the content is at least somewhat decent in quality and there’s a guild willing to go the distance to be number one, it will never die. People might note their surprise and disappointment about how quickly the content was defeated, but the fact of the matter is that people will still follow whoever the top guild is through that content.
I’m Back; The DAoC Experiment
2The past two weeks have been extremely busy with finals, work, raiding, guild leadership, real life issues, my Lost addiction, and other things I’m not at leisure to discuss. I’d also been conducting an experiment with DAoC, basically evaluating its current situation to solidify or change any points made in my earlier contrasting juxtaposition of WoW and DAoC. But with finals, some indulgence in leisure, and the DAoC experience having ended, I’m back to full-time blogging.
The DAoC Experiment Is Over
At first, I tried to play my old characters again: a level 50 spiritmaster and a level 49 shaman. Something I found amusing was that I was still in my old guild from four years ago. However, it was not the same guild I remember. The helpful members from back in the day were no longer around. Instead, there was only a handful of players ever online, and they were all elitist. If you asked them a question, they didn’t respond. And they’d kick you from a group for one of the “better” members of the guild. “Better” meaning older and elitist, because they weren’t actually deserving of their pride considering the terrible play. Yeah, let’s go troll for kills around an enemy keep with an eight-person group, instead of intercepting roaming offenses and wiping them with stun-PBAoE tactics. That’s sarcasm, for non-DAoC players, because sitting around a keep in a small group with only one mediocre healer is a death wish. You should only do so if it seems vacant and you’re trying to actually take the keep. Otherwise, keep your distance and try to catch people that actually leave the keep.
I also rediscovered my hatred for the ML abilities you can get in the Trials of Atlantis expansion. Pardon me for thinking it’s stupid that an offensive raid never has to worry about AoE DoT’s because their low realm-ranked healers can just stand out of LOS next to a power font and spam the fuck out of their group heal without having to worry about their power (mana). And pardon me if I think it’s stupid that the people hit with the AoE DoT can just stand next to a heal font out of LoS while their healer is spamming heals on them without having to be in LOS of the people they’re healing. It makes using siege weapons like trebuchets unnecessary in many situations, because damage output by defenders is not an issue. The only issue, really, is if you can break down the door with a ram without dying to boiling oil, or if those defenders can charge outside the keep, take out your healers and CC classes and wipe you entirely.
So, with all of the things I disliked about normal servers, I ended up re-rolling on a classic realm, where ML abilities don’t exist. But this brought back memories of how terrible the leveling system really is, though some improvements had been made in my absence. The tutorial zone was perfect. On your minimap, yellow dots were implemented to indicate a quest giver, and red dots to indicate an NPC or place you need to go to in order to complete quest objectives. Furthermore, the quests were interesting and offered ample rewards for the required effort. However, this system only partially existed outside of the tutorial zone, and the rewards became inadequate shortly after leaving this zone. By level 12, it was much more efficient for me to enter a battleground and kill mobs there for the bonus experience, while farming aurulite from the Catacombs instances to buy gear, all of which is soloable. But this meant I could only grind mobs or PvP for decent experience. The only quests I bothered to do were parts of my epic armor quest, so I could potentially use my level 50 epic armor once capped. But the quests themselves give little experience for doing them and take forever to complete (and the higher level ones are impossible to solo).
So it was a rather frustrating experience to discover very little had improved in the four years of DAoC’s existence since my departure. The only positive was the fact that you can level easily in battlegrounds provided there’s enough people there to kill and help you kill people. Being there to take the central keep of a battleground is worth between 10 and 50 percent of a level, depending on your level relative to the BG’s level range (each of which is split into tiers of five levels: 40-44, 35-39, etc.). But that requires there to actually be enough members of your realm on to counter enemy forces. It also requires there to actually be enemy forces, and for them not to get discouraged when they wipe. It also requires the BG to be popular, and the mid-level BG’s are anything but that. Between level 25 and 35, there’s almost no one interested in participating in the BG’s. So you’re stuck grinding out your levels, and I just couldn’t stomach that enough to satisfy my curiosity over Labyrinth of the Minotaur’s content.
So I ended my DAoC experiment prematurely. The idea was to gather a good amount of RvR data to compare and contrast with WoW. But my frustration was too high for me to bother continuing. I didn’t want to finish leveling to 50, whereas in WoW I have no problems at all leveling alts. I actually enjoy it. But I do like the fact that I could level while PvPing. However, for WoW, that would potentially ruin the twink community. I’d elaborate more, but it would be nothing other than what I have already said in some of my previous entries.
Regarding the Leaked WotLK Information
1May 21, 2008
by Lume
in Wrath of the Lich King
I’ve decided not to discuss the leaked WotLK information, out of respect for the NDA, regardless of whether I am bound to it or not. As alphas go, a lot of the content is simply there for testing purposes and either won’t make it into the game or will be changed dramatically. So it seems fruitless to even bother discussing this information. However, I will discuss anything Blizzard has seen fit to publicize, as it means this material is close to having Blizzard’s stamp of approval. I will also discuss anything regarding the beta phase, considering the TBC beta did not have an NDA and a lot of the content was more polished and fit for release at the time.
Also, I want to apologize for my lack of updates lately. Most of my time outside of raids was spent studying for finals, so I had very little time to brainstorm and write anything worth posting.
Good Riddance
2May 16, 2008
I normally wouldn’t talk about guilds breaking apart, but I have some points to make regarding this particular guild “death.” Death and Taxes officially announced their demise this morning. We all saw it coming, considering they hadn’t posted about progression in months. But what grates my nerves is the reason Xi gives for their breakup.
Somewhere along the line people got the idea that they were bigger than the guild. That what they wanted was more important than what was good for the guild. That somehow they deserved respect just for being around.
This is curious, considering insider sources said the reason they died was because interpersonal guild drama had permeated beyond their web site and forums and into the raid itself. I’m not one to capitalize on such drama, so I’m not going to go into detail about it. If you really want to know, you can research it yourself. But know, for your sake, that the content of such drama is definitely not work safe. Avoid it if you don’t care for such drama or your boss would fire you over viewing nude pictures.
Watching Xi try to fabricate some ambiguous reason is really abhorrent and a disservice to responsible guilds and the WoW community as a whole. Or maybe he’s not fabricating the reason, and he’s just oblivious as to what some of their members really thought of the entire situation. In the end, I’m not surprised people undermined him. He’s an abrasive figure with outlandish opinions. And I’m not surprised they didn’t get enough quality recruits, because who wants to join a guild where potential drama is going to cause the guild to explode? That’s right, no one. Especially not when you have so many quality guilds to choose from these days.
As amusing as many people thought the entire situation was, people recognized the fact that publicizing personal problems within your guild is a terrible policy to hold. Especially when progress takes a backseat and people would rather continue to talk about the unfolding events, instead of why they were wiping and how to correct the problem.
The ship went down faster than the Titanic, but the rats were bailing out before the iceberg was ever even in sight.
As an outsider, it seemed to me that Death and Taxes was the iceberg that sank its own ship. It seemed to me like a guild led by terrible people with horrible public policy. They were a blight within the raiding community. That’s not to say they didn’t have some really awesome members during their time. But I’m glad some of these people recognized the abomination they were supporting by simply being a part of the guild. Good on them for having the balls to move on and cause the house of cards to come crashing down.
A GM’s Perspective: The Hardcore-Casual Paradox
1May 14, 2008
“We are a casual raiding guild recruiting for Sunwell.” “You can’t be casual if you’re planning to raid Sunwell.” “We only raid two days a week. That makes us casual.” “But you’re raiding Sunwell, that makes you hardcore.”
Some people believe there is a paradoxal relationship between the concepts of hardcore and casual. People argue you can only be one or the other. But what these people fail to realize is that there is a subjective view of the topic centered around the relation of specific guilds to each other. To give a personal example, compared to all of the guilds on my server just venturing into the recently opened Hyjal, my guild Lunacy is definitely hardcore. However, if you were to compare us to Nihilum, we’re absolutely casual. This example highlights how the hardcore-casual spectrum itself is subjective based on relativity.
The concept of casual and hardcore is such a gray area that even sarcastic terms like “hardcore casual” have developed as a direct result. If you spend hours a week doing heroics to farm badges to pick up all of the gear you need from the Sunwell Isle badge vendor, but you’ve never stepped foot into a 25-man dungeon, you’re hardcore casual. If you raid only two days a week, but you’ve killed Kalecgos in Sunwell, you’re hardcore casual. If you have the skill to top 2K in rating, but you plateau around 2100 because you don’t practice enough, you’re hardcore casual. And if you’ve killed the Eredar Twins, but you don’t raid nearly as often as Nihilum, fear not… you’re hardcore casual!
The only people who don’t fit into this ambivalent category are those on each extreme of the spectrum. These are the only areas which are not easily disputed. Joe Schmoe, who’s taken a year and a few months to get to 70 is definitely casual. And guilds like SK Gaming, Exodus and Nihilum are definitely hardcore. Anyone attempting to argue otherwise would probably be met with responses of outright laughter, which is indicative of a concept commonly agreed upon.
So the important thing to understand as a GM is that people will find their own definition for your guild, regardless of where you stand. Don’t try to define yourself as either hardcore or casual, as someone is always going dispute whichever you choose to attribute to your guild. Only do so if you’re a guild that barely raids Karazhan or a guild that has achieved or come close to achieving world or regional firsts.
