Back to Hibernation

By GoW | Published: December 9, 2009

Logged on a cou­ple of times in my free week.

The Argent Tour­na­ment was inter­est­ing. My priest’s dual spec was fun. Play­ing along­side my wife was fun.

I actu­ally blocked out some time last night to take an offer up from a friend regard­ing run­ning the Tour­na­ment of Cham­pi­ons. I was look­ing for­ward to it.

Of course, it ended up being patch day, and the servers were shot, yield­ing an infi­nite response after every time I tried to log in:

You have been disconnected from the server.

Waited a half hour, tried again, then another half hour, then another. Gave up.

What really struck me about this was that there was no offi­cial note from Bliz­zard about why it hap­pened. No win­dow on the login screen acknowl­edg­ing the prob­lem, no details on what the prob­lem was or the progress on it. Noth­ing on the offi­cial web­site, either. I found an arti­cle on WoW Insider with details.

What a weird way to learn about the sta­tus of a game where you pay for every minute of ser­vice. Five years in and a patch still wholly kills their servers for a day.

Evi­dently it got fixed after I went to bed for the evening. When I tried to log on this morn­ing, my free week was over. The error mes­sage after your time is up help­fully reminds you to go pur­chase more time to play. Time, like yesterday?

Same issues. WoW is a great feast, with tons of left­overs. It’s just a poor snack.

My wife and I will prob­a­bly check out Cat­a­clysm. Given this handy reminder of uptime and login prob­lems, we’ll pass on the launch cel­e­bra­tion, though.

Posted in the free week | 1 Comment

Rebirth

By GoW | Published: December 2, 2009

The kind peo­ple at Bliz­zard sent me an email to let me know that they

  1. miss me
  2. would like me to come back to par­tic­i­pate in WoW’s five year anniversary

They did this by offer­ing a 7-day free revis­it­ing period so that I could see all the new fun they’ve added. Some­thing about Onyxia being dual spec or something?

My wife and I often talk about return­ing to WoW. Our sec­ond daugh­ter is beyond the six-month mark, and we almost some­what have some time at night.

Return­ing sounds awfully tempt­ing, but we decided that it was prob­a­bly not the best idea. Still so much to do apart from WoW: par­ent­ing, career, other hob­bies, friends, exer­cise, other fam­ily stuff.

But then she walked by when I had the email open.

“Is that an Onyxia whelpling minipet?”

“Yeah.”

“Ohhhh, well it’s a good thing that I didn’t get an email, too.” Then she laughed ner­vously.

Right, I mean lucky for us that they didn’t extend the free week to her as well. We wouldn’t play apart, so if they had offered… oh wait, there’s her email too.

Well.

I mean, free minipet, right?

It’s only one week, right?

Posted in the free week, world of warcraft | Leave a comment

Times Change

By GoW | Published: February 25, 2009

My wife and I were lucky enough to have our first daugh­ter last year. We will be luck­ier still to have our sec­ond daugh­ter later this year! The prospect of a sec­ond child has brought a lot of things into focus, includ­ing exactly how much time we’re going to have to play World of War­craft… which is vir­tu­ally none, given how this first year of hav­ing one child has been. Read More »

Posted in world of warcraft | 7 Comments

Wrath Emblem Design Revealed

By GoW | Published: February 6, 2009

Hid­den in an oth­er­wise bland post on the next sea­son of pvp rewards, game designer Kal­gan let slip how emblem pro­gres­sion is going to go for the rest of Wrath! Here’s the rel­e­vant quote:

it won’t be quite as easy to get deadly items via emblems of con­quest as hate­ful items cur­rently are via emblems of valor

Well, that’s inter­est­ing. So what have we learned? Read More »

Posted in world of warcraft | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Emblem Strategy for the Super-Casual

By GoW | Published: February 2, 2009

Update! This arti­cle is well-intended but the truth has been revealed, and I guessed wrong. More infor­ma­tion in the arti­cle “Wrath Emblem Design Revealed”.

How­ever, it kills me to delete text, so I’ll leave it here any­way. Also as a reminder to myself that design is opaque.

Only raid or instance once a week? Won­der­ing what to do with those 25 or 30 emblems you’ve finally accu­mu­lated? Like real-life money, don’t let those shiny tokens burn a hole in your pocket.

“But, but, but how can I wait? Zomgepics!”

I know, I know. The siren call of zomgepics beckon us all.

The emblem gear will (in all like­li­hood) be refreshed when a higher tier of con­tent comes out, just like the Badge of Jus­tice sys­tem did in the Burn­ing Cru­sade. This means that your Emblems will (in all like­li­hood) appre­ci­ate in value.

Read More »

Posted in world of warcraft | Tagged , , | 5 Comments
Polytoons can be Bad | Groups of Words

Polytoons can be Bad

By GoW | Published: August 27, 2008

My main is my holy priest. My raid-ready alt is a pro­tec­tion war­rior. I like heal­ing slightly more than tank­ing, but hon­estly I’m happy play­ing either. I’m also glad to pinch hit in a dps sit­u­a­tion every now and then, because it means I have more time to enjoy my scotch.

After a lot of prac­tice, I’ve become good enough to either heal or tank for instances, hero­ics, and raids. The change of pace actu­ally keeps my over­all inter­est level higher. When I brought my tank along for the ride, how I was helping!

Or at least, how I thought I was help­ing. Despite the fact that I’ve become more use­ful to my guild and have more fun play­ing the game, the social ram­i­fi­ca­tions have made me wish that I hadn’t tried it in the first place. There were consequences.

I helped many raids get off the ground. I subbed in as guild Main Tank for a while when ours went loco, and pro­gres­sion didn’t miss a beat. I switched between core healer and core tank as the sit­u­a­tion demanded. It was very fun to play.

Many peo­ple in my guild looked at what I was doing and said, “Wow, how awe­some to be so useful!”

Lots of people.

Eigh­teen months later, my guild has a 10-man raid’s worth of excel­lent poly­toon­ers: a rogue/holy priest, a warlock/healing shammy, two mage/holy priests, a mage/warrior tank, etc. We have far fewer raids stall due to not being able to fill a role. Obvi­ously, this hasn’t been a prob­lem at all for peo­ple who are already good at the game. If any­thing, it’s made our core stronger and more ver­sa­tile, with peo­ple who under­stand the game better.

The prob­lem is that the peo­ple who aren’t good at the game–com­mon in casual/raiding guilds–also try to poly­toon. They’re tak­ing their lim­ited sup­ply of skill and try­ing to spread it across even more char­ac­ters. That well-meaning 10th man is guar­an­teed to be so forever­more. If the player couldn’t fig­ure out how to do dam­age as a hunter, how are they going to get bet­ter when split­ting time between a hunter and pal­adin tank? Answer: a lot of sigh­ing from raid leadership.

I still feel that good play­ers and offi­cers should be ready to plug com­mon holes in a raid. How­ever, don’t con­fuse util­ity with what the team needs to suc­ceed. Make cer­tain that your guild out­lays that mains should always be everyone’s pri­or­ity. Try­ing to intro­duce that thought becomes much more dif­fi­cult after the poly­toon mind­set has grown roots.

More Words!

This entry was posted in world of warcraft and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

4 Comments

  1. Kikidas
    Posted August 27, 2008 at 5:38 pm | Permalink

    This is true to a cer­tain extent, yes…

    But occa­sion­ally you have some­one who can’t DPS their way through a sack of wet baby mice wind up being a really awe­some healer, because for what­ever rea­son, heal­ing fits their mind­set and their abil­i­ties bet­ter than DPS­ing did.

    Reply
  2. GoW
    Posted August 28, 2008 at 6:56 am | Permalink

    @Kikidas — I thought more about what you said. (I shouldn’t post when I’m tired.)

    I agree with you. I’ve seen bad heal­ers become good(-enough) dps. I’ve had some­one find suc­cess only on their fourth try at endgame. For some rea­son, enhance­ment shaman just clicked for him. Peo­ple should experiment.

    I’m warn­ing against the case of the per­son who’s fail­ing to move on from their mediocre main while simul­ta­ne­ously work­ing on a “raid-ready alt”. For peo­ple try­ing to find their best match, they’re not going to hang on to the role that didn’t work.

    This is a strike against the “level to max level, then see how well you do in endgame” sys­tem, huh? You play a toon for all that time, and then whoops, you’re no good at instancing/raiding on it.

    Reply
  3. kikidas
    Posted September 1, 2008 at 11:39 am | Permalink

    Hehehe, this is why mul­ti­ple alts all lev­el­ing together is good! One, you’re never out of rested XP and two, when you hit 70, you hit 70 with everyone!

    That’s my excuse for my sta­ble and I’m stick­ing to it.

    The hard part is… some peo­ple think they’re good at what they’re doing. And how do you tell a friend that… uh, you’re ter­ri­ble. ><

    Reply

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared.

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>