It's been a long time...

No, I'm not going to quote Led Zeppelin songs here. I just wanted to do something I haven't done in quite a while, which is post a blog. I haven't been writing for a number of reasons, mostly because I've had a lack of things to write about that would be different from what the other WoW economy blogs are covering. Plus, there had been some guild drama that was bumming me out. I'll be writing more often now, as I've found a new guild and I'm making a lot of money in something that I've wrote a bit about in the past - inscription. More on that later.

More Pet Peeves

Some of these are just minor annoyances. I know a lot of times people are rushed to type and mistakes get made a lot. That’s fine. When I see these mistakes being made on forums or even worse in business emails, it makes me a bit mental. I’m not the best at grammar and punctuation, but here goes.

1) Advise and advice – I see this one over and over again on forums where people write “my advise is”. Seriously, stop playing WoW and do your English homework. I’ll give examples of the correct usage: I’m going to give you some advice. Please advise him of the problems with his gear. One ends in “ice” and is pronounced like “ice”. See? Is that so hard?

2) Their, there and they’re –You should know this before you make it to college. If you don’t know the difference, look them up.

3) Rude PuGs in vent – Name calling when someone makes a mistake in a group or raid, making funny sounds too often and chatter at inappropriate times. These are all the characteristics of rude PuGs. As Penny Arcade summed up so well, Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Dickwad. That’s right Mr. I Make Chewbacca Noises, it was funny the first time, but now you’re just annoying. The name calling thing came up just a few days ago when I was healing a Naxx 25 with a group of ½ guildies and ½ PuGs. One of the PuGs wasn’t following directions well in a stressed situation and someone else started running his mouth and name calling. That kind of behavior should not be tolerated.

4) Guildies who pug vault on Tuesday afternoon – A significant number of my guildmates and people on my friends list PuG Vault before I even get home from work on Tuesday. WTF? Maybe if they waited for the rest of us they wouldn’t get loot ninja’ed from them and we’d have more stuff to do as a guild. That’s right, I’m looking at YOU AUO! Get a grip on your completion anxiety and wait for the rest of us to at least get home from work!

5) Fish feast – Wouldn’t you rather have the spell power or attack power buff and stamina? You’re hurting my sales! Now go buy some firecracker salmon and dragonfin fillet. You’ll find them on the auction house in convenient stacks of 5.

6) Wannabe raid leaders – What’s that saying about too many cooks in the kitchen? Just because we wiped doesn’t mean the strategy isn’t sound or tanks/healers need to be replaced. Sometimes, $#!^ happens. Suck it up and try what works a few more times before you confuse the whole raid with Plan B, C and D.

7) Using SO as an intensifier – This is used most frequently as “Thank you so much!” with an emphasis on the “so”. What’s odd is that I usually hear it from women more than men. Other examples are “The sky was so blue” “That movie was so bad” and “That guy is so tall!” The word “so” isn’t an intensifier like the word “very” is. Need more details?

OK, I feel SO much better now. ;-)

We're ready to believe you!

Tomorrow, Ghostbusters The Video Game comes out for just about every platform I can think of. I've preordered the XBox 360 version. I'm usually a PC snob but this time, I think playing on the big screen will be better, even if I have to use the clunky console controller. I'm really hoping it will hold my attention. I've been a HUGE Ghostbusters fan since I saw the first movie in 1984. A few years ago, me and four other guys here in the IT department dressed up as Ghostbusters for Halloween and played the movies all day on a projector in the office. That's how much I love the franchise. I wouldn't be nearly as hopeful for the game if it weren't for the fact that it was written and voiced by the original cast. The real test will be to see how much the game pulls me away from playing WoW.

Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!

Writers Block

There doesn’t seem to be a lot to write about in WoW lately. The game seems to be on cruise control for the most part, with few major changes to class mechanics or professions. This doesn’t really bode well for me as a new WoW blogger as I'm struggling for stuff to write about. I’m beginning to realize why so many old and popular blogs have closed down in the past few months. There just isn’t a lot of excitement going on in the game to keep long time players interested and thus, long time bloggers have less to write about too. Wowenomics has a nice discussion about the Death of WoW that ties into this idea quite nicely.

So here’s my take on the Death of WoW. For people like me who had a level 70 well before Lich King was released, we’ve probably done most of what we’ve wanted to do in Lich King. We’ve leveled to 80, sometimes on several characters, and got a lot of great epic level gear from the treadmill that WoW haters loathe so much – reputation, heroics, Naxx and PvP. We’ve leveled our tradeskills and have a ton of achievements/mounts/pets/titles to show off. So now what? Ulduar is out, but that really is only enticing to the more hard core raiders. PvP is as frustrating as it always has been. The next major content patch is months away. Yea, I can see why the hard core players (those that play at least 15 hours a week) are starting to lose interest.

I guess it’s not really a bad thing that we hard core players have less to do in game. I used to have hobbies outside WoW. I have over $1000 of telescope and astronomy equipment that hasn’t been touched in a really long time. I used to enjoy cooking dinner for my wife and me. The list of hobbies and activities that were superseded by WoW goes on and on and now I have more time to get back into them.

What say you? Are you playing more or less than 15 hours a week and how much has that changed in the past 2 months? Are you running out of stuff to do in game?

WoW Pet Peeves

Justamom over at Magerly Different had a list of her WoW Pet Peeves back in May and I wanted to do my own list. My list focuses more on the "WoWspeak" that players have invented due to lack of typing skills, lazyness, etc.

1) Using the word "roll" to mean "create a new character". I'm pretty sure I know how this one got started. As a former Dungeons & Dragons player, I've rolled quite a few characters in my lifetime. It always involved several dice, thus the "roll" part. In WoW, there is no rolling during character creation, so you aren't "rolling" anything! So, all of you "roll" users, please return the word to its rightful place in the pen and paper role playing arena. That reminds me, please learn the difference between the words "roll" and "role". English is fun!

2) Chieves and Chanters. These two pop up in guild chat all the time and it drives me nuts! They are short for achievement and enchanter. Chanters are monks who recite words in a monotonous and repetitive tone, so sorry, that word is already taken. Chieves just looks like someone misspelled chives, which go on baked potatos.

3) Using odd abbreviations for dungeons or raids. The one that comes to mind most is "VC" for the Deadmines. It took a while before I found out that VC was Edwin VanCleef. Is it too hard to type out Deadmines?

4) Toons. I can kind of see why people started using the word toon, since WoW has a cartoonish art style and the word character is 5 letters longer to type. As we who play dirty auction house tricks have found, people are lazy, so now we have people using the word toon and paying 200% prices for a stack of 4 saronite bars. Which brings me to my last pet peeve for this list.

5) Lazyness. Players will spend 10 hours a weekend farming for herbs/ore/leather and when they get yelled at for doing less DPS than the main tank, they get offended. How about spending 1 of those hours reading a helpful blog or two, or maybe a site like Elitist Jerks and figure out a proper attack rotation and talent build? Those of us who do good DPS in PvE got there by doing a little research. Try asking us and we'll be more than helpful. Besides, top DPS players love to have their ego stroked ;-)

How To Fix It Part 2: PvP

I’m not sure if a game company can make a compelling world PvP MMO. I think one main reason Blizzard decided to add the Wintergrasp zone was because Mythic was working on Warhammer and they were going to have world PvP zones everywhere with cool keeps that you could attack with siege engines. So, we get Wintergrasp. I think the gameplay design of Wintergrasp is fine. Destructible walls everywhere, ways to upgrade which siege engine you get, fast and furious action. That is until the lag monster shows up and eats the entire zone. This brings me back to the statement that I don’t think any game company can make a compelling MMO based on World PvP. Once you reach a certain threshold of players per square unit of territory, the lag makes whatever you are doing unplayable. It’s exactly the same thing that happened when I was playing Warhammer and there was a 50+ on 50+ keep siege.

How do we make it work? Well, Blizzard has just implemented their “hotfix” for the lag by making the daily quests weekly quests to drive down demand. It seems to have worked so far. My wife and I did Wintergrasp on Wednesday night afer 8pm and there was little to no lag because there wasn’t a ton of players in the zone. It’s not an elegant solution, but I suppose it works in the short term. The only way to really make it work long term is to have the zone instanced. Alterac Valley works very well and it’s 40 on 40. Since it’s instanced and the objectives are spread all over the map, you rarely have more than 40 players in the same area on the map. That keeps network traffic lower and thus less lag. Plus, you can have all the dailies you want. So, Wintergrasp should be instanced and have quest objectives spread all over the map to keep people from all clumping on the keep’s front door.

The other major issue I have with PvP is that in order to get a great weapon, shield or offhand item, you pretty much have to raid. Forcing players (aka customers) to play the game a way they don’t want to isn’t a good idea. Sure, you can get to 1850 and get the first tier of Furious weapon, but by the very nature of the rating system , that is out of reach for the vast majority of players. There should be a middle grade of epic weapon somewhere between the crafted epics and the weapons that drop in 25 man Naxx that a pure PvP player can buy. It should be very expensive in whatever currency is used to buy it, but it should be attainable by non-raiders.

I’m generally happy with the battleground system. Sure, most of the games I play are completely dominated by the Horde, but Alliance on Bleeding Hollow have long accepted that fact. Strand of the Ancients is a pretty cool concept and one of it’s best features is that it will NEVER run longer than 20 minutes. Just thinking of hour long Warsong matches makes me want to cry. It would be a nice added bonus if there was an updated reputation system with battleground factions as another source of gear. It doesn’t have to be great stuff, maybe a supplemental way to get new 80’s in some blues that will keep them alive for longer than 3 seconds. Some new mounts, pets and fluff items would be cool too.

Lastly, the Vault of Archavon needs to be addressed. The Vault now has a second boss, Emalon, who is significantly harder to beat than Archavon. He is not the loot piñata that Archavon is. The two bosses need to be separated out into two separate instances. Getting a group together for the old Vault was hard enough and a lot of players are in their PvP spec, so healing and dps is lower than normal. That makes getting a successful group together for both bosses much harder. Separating the two would make the raids run more smoothly and recruitment for raids much easier and more targeted.

So, while all these issues may not be contributing directly to the “meh” I think it would help to excite players and keep them engaged in the game. What say you?

We've been linked!

I just recently got linked by the folks at WoWEnomics. First, thanks to whoever linked us! And thanks to anyone who has come here and taken the time to read more than the first sentence of any of our posts. I know the layout is a bit spartan, so I'll be thinking of ways to spruce up the place a bit.