Category: world of warcraft

the game, the addic­tion, the zomg epics

If, If, Wait, Wait

My 10-month-old daugh­ter is sick, cough­ing, con­gest­ed. Con­fused. She does­n’t under­stand why my wife and I don’t just fix it. It’s impos­si­ble to explain that we would use this awe­some con­ges­tion pow­er on any­one but her. So, lots of sooth­ing, lots of grumpy dia­per changes, lots of naps inter­rupt­ed by vicious chok­ing on mucus. She final­ly goes to real sleep late in the evening.

Par­ent free­dom time! How­ev­er, said par­ents are absolute­ly exhaust­ed. Need to do some­thing before sleep, though. We’re not parent-bots.

“Hey, you know what would be great?”

“No, what’s that?”

“Want to do some dailies? Just to relax for a few min­utes. Get you clos­er to that rep sword.”

“That sounds good!”

Ok then! Let’s log on for fif­teen min­utes or so and do some dailies.

Position in queue: 429
Estimated time: Calculating...

The cal­cu­lat­ed time end­ed up being twen­ty-four minutes.

Back in the days when we were sit­ting down for a three or four hour block, a twen­ty-four-minute delay was just a minor irri­ta­tion. But now, we’re (try­ing to) log on for a half-hour or even ten-minute ses­sion. A twen­ty-four minute wait? It’s the whole thing.

This got me thinking.

Con­tin­ue read­ing If, If, Wait, Wait

Ghostcrawler is Awesome

In ref­er­ence to Adam Holisky’s recent WoW Insid­er’s post The Ghost­crawler Exper­i­ment, where the ques­tions are:

  1. Is the GE (Ghost­crawler era) of WoW bet­ter than the BGE?
  2. Does Ghost­crawler do a good job?

I just want­ed to post some­thing quick in response. I’ve writ­ten about Ghost­crawler before, although I per­haps was­n’t as blunt as I could have been. So, I will speak more plain­ly now: Yes, and I can’t believe that we’re even talk­ing about this.

Con­tin­ue read­ing Ghost­crawler is Awesome

Overview of Loot Systems

Zomgepics! The joy, the sor­row. The absolute headache for any­one run­ning a guild. This is a fol­lowup arti­cle to The Most Suc­cess­ful Loot Sys­tems.

Any sys­tem that involves large teams and lim­it­ed loot (for exam­ple, PvE raid­ing in World of War­craft) requires a sys­tem to sort that loot out. If your 25-per­son group takes down a raid boss, and that boss drops 4 items, how do you deter­mine who gets those items? It takes time and effort to raid, and some­one has to get gear before some­one else.

There are many, many kinds of loot sys­tems. How­ev­er, all of the ones I’m aware of fall into three broad cat­e­gories: earn and spend, high­er author­i­ty, and ran­dom. Con­tin­ue read­ing Overview of Loot Systems

The Most Successful Loot Systems

A friend recent­ly asked me an off­hand ques­tion about zero-sum dkp sys­tems with a 25% month­ly degen­er­a­tion with a weird main/alt pol­i­cy… and I could imme­di­ate­ly rat­tle off the strengths and weak­ness­es of such a sys­tem, includ­ing where it could be sub­vert­ed and where the like­ly prob­lems would be down the road. Ok, so it turns out that I’m inter­est­ed in loot sys­tems and guild lead­er­ship.

So what’s the goal of loot sys­tems? Most arti­cles I’ve seen about loot assign­ments is about get­ting the gear to the right place while being fair.

Well… yes. That’s the stat­ed goal. There’s more, though.

Cas­sio, a guest blog­ger at World of Mat­ti­cus, uncov­ered the truth in a post about assign­ing loot (empha­sis mine):

In my guild, I am cur­rent­ly the raid leader for ten man raids and it falls onto me to sort out loot dis­tri­b­u­tion and how to do so with­out caus­ing prob­lems that could desta­bi­lize the raid group and force us back due to peo­ple leav­ing and hav­ing to replace with new people.

In pro­gram­mer speak, this is Step 0. You don’t list Step 0 to the guild, but when design­ing a loot sys­tem, it should be first on your list.

Con­tin­ue read­ing The Most Suc­cess­ful Loot Systems