Month: May 2008

Wrath of the L

I’m work­ing on a cou­ple of pieces based on the WotLK news updates. Before that flur­ry of announce­ments, I was work­ing on bor­ing posts like “Mas­ter Loot­er is the only option”, “Pace isn’t that hard” and oth­er pieces that sound even worse. Blah blah. I got bored while writ­ing them.

I write every­thing con­cur­rent­ly, so when I do update it will be with a series of posts. This is how I wrote fic­tion, too.

Part of writ­ing about the expan­sion is typ­ing out the name of said expan­sion. I mistype WotLK every time. What should be:

Wrath of the Lich King

comes out:

Wrath of the Licking

(Insert mas­sive­ly mul­ti­play­er punch­line here.)

Happy Mother’s Day

Being a brand new dad has attuned me to Moth­er’s Day. I used to obey when my father told me to get my moth­er a gift, but that’s because there was the threat of phys­i­cal vio­lence if I did­n’t. That turned into a habit, but I nev­er real­ly got it. Ah, parenting.

If you already under­stand Moth­er’s Day before becom­ing a par­ent your­self, then I raise a toast to you. If you don’t under­stand it or sim­ply go through the motions like I did, all I can say is that you’ll get it as soon as you have kids. I’ve already called my moth­er to apol­o­gize for not under­stand­ing it soon­er. She laughed at me.

So Hap­py Moth­er’s Day every­one, espe­cial­ly to gamer moms and writer moms.

(Yes, this is a day late. I thought it defeat­ed the pur­pose if I took part of her Moth­er’s Day to write a post on my blog about Moth­er’s Day. So my new-mom wife got the whole day. Part of that day was giv­ing her a craft­ed [Belt of Deep Shad­ow]. You might chuck­le, but she loved it, and it was a large upgrade over her Nether­storm blue quest­ing belt. And yes, there was a real-life gift as well.)

Feedburner is live

A friend told me that Feed­burn­er is a bet­ter way to go for man­ag­ing feeds. Now there’s a new sub­scribe but­ton in the Meta sec­tion, I rec­om­mend that you use it. I also turned on email noti­fi­ca­tion for you the rss averse.

WotLK news bomb

WowIn­sid­er and Mmo-cham­pi­on are drown­ing us with links the first huge wave of WotLK news. Most of it is awe­some, while some of it is out­stand­ing.

So now at least I have a large num­ber of top­ics that I want to write about. My very bor­ing, unfin­ished “Mas­ter Loot­er for the win” arti­cle can bliss­ful­ly go back to the drafts.

The Downside of Endgame Guilds

I’ve been read­ing Tobold and Pot­shot late­ly. They’re talk­ing about loot and game design as it relates to endgame guilds, specif­i­cal­ly guild hop­ping and pro­gres­sion prob­lems due to it. I haven’t seen a decent expla­na­tion of the prob­lem, but as a guild officer/leader I’ve seen it in action twice now, once with the orig­i­nal WoW endgame and now with the TBC endgame. I don’t have a solu­tion, but I can frame the problem.

For me, the most fun time in WoW is right after an expan­sion hits, when there’s lim­it­ed col­lec­tive endgame explo­ration. All the con­tent is new and fresh, then I find myself group­ing with not just my long-term guild friends, but also my friends who left to get on the pro­gres­sion roller coast­er. It’s glo­ri­ous! This is what the first two months of TBC was like.

Then, endgame progress starts to hap­pen, and a tiered sys­tem begins to form.

Con­tin­ue read­ing The Down­side of Endgame Guilds