What makes a main, a main?

I read a WoW Insider post today about mains and alts. I disagree with the answers offered in the article and the comments, so I thought I’d give it a try.

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Is being a sports fan similar to playing World of Warcraft? No. But having seasonal duration hobbies is!

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I read a great article over at the excellent Chick GM about officer leadership styles and what makes a good officer. It made me think about what I valued in GMs and officers, and what I learned as GM.

It took me a long time to come up with my online leadership style, and longer still to identify pieces of what I was actually trying to accomplish. I’ve been a leader in multiple non-game places, but the MMORPG space is different. My guild suffered a bit while I learned, but eventually I got the hang of it. When it was time for me to hand the reins over, I came up with a list of directives and shared it with the subsequent GMs of my guild.

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A number of people who visit here are bloggers themselves, so I thought I’d just describe what technology makes this blog work on a new static page. I’ll keep it updated as times change.

One of the great joys of WoW is how couple-friendly it is. My wife and I are suckers for some cooperative multiplayer, and we haven’t looked back since we set up her account. We play together all the time, doing dailies, farming mobs, instancing and raiding (although we’re learning that being new parents isn’t really conducive to raiding, so that’s trailing off). Also, leveling alts.

We have some experience leveling a number of duos.

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This review is going to fail.

I’m a big fan of words and writing, but sometimes they just fail, and describing what simple joy actually feels like is one of those times. Rather than try to describe the mechanics of the game or what it’s about, I’ll work on why I like it.

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Continuing yesterday’s explanation of Wrath itemization, let’s experiment and take it a step further. Here are some further class changes Blizzard could make to simplify the “nobody in our guild could use this loot” problem. (Rampant armchair game design follows.)

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I love what I’m hearing about the new itemization from beta. A lot of it is still in flux, but there’s a core variable that isn’t: a number of formerly separate stats have been combined:

• critical strike = critical strike + spell critical strike
• hit rating = hit + spell hit
• haste rating = haste + spell haste
• spellpower = healing + spell damage

This is absolutely wonderful. If you’re wondering why they’re doing this or why it’s so important to the quality of PvE, let’s geek out a bit and look at each class, the kinds of gear it currently wants, and what just the spellpower (healing + spell damage) combine means in terms of how it’s going to make your PvE instances and raids happier.

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In The Incredibles, Dash is the young son who can run and move very very fast, like the Flash. There’s a scene where he’s running away from some mercenary villains, through a jungle. So he’s zipping between trees and jumping over logs, but his visibility ahead is limited because the jungle is so thick. Suddenly the forest ends and there’s a tiny bit of beach before a large bay of water, with him barreling towards it far too fast for him to safely turn away. Dash clenches his eyes closed, expecting to wipe out spectacularly… and then opens them to learn that he can run across the water’s surface. Surprise! He lets out this mischievous, joyous, relief-filled laugh, then zips away. It’s a great scene. (Brad Bird for overlord)

In World of Warcraft, my wife and I have had that laugh many times.

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…for now, according to recent posts on mmo-champion. They might look into it in the future.

So my thoughts on connecting the dots can be archived and then perhaps revived when Blizzard gets around to account-based achievements.