Tag Archives: zomgepics

Emblem Strategy for the Super-Casual

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 [...]
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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 [...]
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Game Terms Overcome

I saw the fol­low­ing title on my gmail homepage: Wired: Awe­somely Bad Defense Trin­kets, Part II …and thought, “A WoW the­o­rycraft arti­cle in Wired?! Is this a par­ody or…?” It’s funny, because of course the word trin­ket existed before WoW. How­ever, in the last three years, I haven’t seen that word once out­side of a WoW con­text, [...]
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Historicity and WoW

In his excel­lent book “Man in the High Cas­tle”, Philip K. Dick talks about items and historicity: She said, ‘what is “historicity”?’ ‘When a thing has his­tory in it. Lis­ten. One of those two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assas­si­nated. And one wasn’t. One has his­toric­ity, a hell of [...]
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Geeky Game Design and Automated Character Audits

My guild fell in love with be.imba and wowheroes a while back. Look, they have gear scores! Trum­pets played through­out the geeky core of the guild: “Finally! A way to grade and com­mu­ni­cate to peo­ple their rel­a­tive progress in the endgame!” For exam­ple: “Hey, you’re not ready for X because you don’t have Y score. [...]
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