Black Raven Dragoons

[Tirian]

So... anyone have any thoughts?

I'm regrettably underwhelmed.

[Grimblast]

I was watching the Blizzcon footage when they announced it. They are saying no big bad guy to fight or thwart this time around but it sounds like this one is going to be about the clash of alliance and horde, in so few words. So probably PVE stuff involving one faction fighting another as well as probably lots of pvp like scenarios. I must admit, I like what I saw about the monk class and the fact that at level 10, pandarens get to choose what faction they want to be with(alliance or hode). If I understood Blizzard correctly, they are pushing up their schedules to release expansions sooner so instead of 2 years, 1 year releases for WOW. This means what they just advertised will be out next year. The footage showed a very complete starting area so looks like they've been busy.

I'm a little up in the air about what they plan on doing with the talent trees. They are reworking talents again to make it much more simpler so you aren't pegged with more useless talent choices and yet still be able to make your build yours rather than a cookie cutter build so its still something in the works. In that regard, I'm taking a wait and see approach. Once they make these talent changes live(most likely before the next expansion) then I'll be able to make a better assessment on what they've done. I've been out of WOW for roughly 6 months but I've been popping in and hanging out with Jay and Jim(Ozmodium). Even from my long hiatus, the game really hasn't changed much. People still say paladins can't heal heroics(or heal at all compared to the other classes) and of course, you know me,"I'm up for the challenge."

I was more interested in the Diablo 3 footage. The game looks like its going to be a blast. I was so pumped by it I installed Diablo 2 and its expansion to go and beat it for old times sake. Apparently if you get an annual WOW subscription, you will get Diablo 3 free as a digital download from Blizzard. Pretty smooth move from Blizzard to retain their customer base and give back something to their customers. They are stemming the flow of customer leaving by enticing them with items and a brand new game. I checked out the plan and its just like a 1 year contract more or less. You can choose how you want to pay. You can just keep paying like you always have from month to month or mix it up with their other options such as every 3 months or 6 months. Contract ends after 12 months. I figured it would've been all the year up front but they played it smart and gave you choices from the existing pay structure.

Of course, I'm still waiting for SWTOR. In the meantime, I'll continue playing WOW very casually(surprisingly, doing pvp and cashing the honor in for justice points is way less time consuming than instancing so easy upgrades are attainable for the casual player) and keep pestering you goonies on steam to go and blow up zombies or some Borderlands action.

PS: Good to hear from ya Tirian! I was wondering if you've been tied up with work or just didn't have a connection for awhile!

[Highgrade]

I'm happy with the stuff the announced. Provided that all of it makes it to live servers.... I am still waiting for my damned dance studio! But all in all the new expansion looks like it will add more casual game play and reward not only the top tier of raiding. should be interesting. And hey i am on a contract now so i will be here. It was the new sparkle pony that did me in lol.

[Zancarius]

They are reworking talents again to make it much more simpler so you aren't pegged with more useless talent choices and yet still be able to make your build yours rather than a cookie cutter build so its still something in the works.

Isn't that what they said about Cataclysm?

At this point, I'm almost convinced that the star developers are on the Diablo III team, and they're slapping all the new hires on the cash cow. Not that there's anything wrong with that (most companies do something similar), but I'm seeing a disconnect between promises made and promises delivered. Next thing you know, their patch notes will have something nebulous like implementing hope and change.

[MaxRile]

how were the talents confusing ??? lol

[Zancarius]

how were the talents confusing ??? lol

Because people are too inept to read tooltips or use Google. True story.

[Tirian]

Hello, kids.

This post will be partly about the game, and partly an update on what I'm up to since Turus had asked. I know I've talked to some of you guys sporadically, but maybe now is a good time to be a little more complete

So, regarding the new expansion. The more I think about it, the more I'm actually liking it -- if Blizz was going to add a new class, it only made sense that the class should be a leather or mail class, and overall I think leather makes more sense since that armor class has always seemed sort of the least in demand. That said, so far, the monk sounds a bit too much like a combination of the druid (full hybrid, leather, binary "balance" requirements in skill usage) and rogue (click-heavy, action-oriented) to me, but as you know, I've never played either of these classes seriously. On the new race, frankly, I really like the addition of pandaren -- I would rather see two interesting, new races for the factions, but we all knew pandaren would come sooner or later, and at least this way they didn't have to go out of their ways to overreach the established content and make something up. Additionally, I will say that I actually strongly like having an initially neutral race and the move away from "silhouette" defining the two factions, a feature that really died long ago anyway in my opinion.

Wow difficulty grid

Wowgrid.jpg (10.58 KiB) Viewed 5169 times

I also like seeing Blizz attempting to create a wider variety of choices, especially casual-time-commitment choices, for endgame content. In my opinion, one of Blizzard's biggest mistakes in Wrath and Cataclysm was in gauging the balance between item level requirements (not hard/fixed, but necessary to succeed), complexity and time commitment required to complete content. Note, those three facets of difficulty are of course interconnected -- the fastest clearing guilds have players who are skilled at the game and devote a significant (probably vast majority) of their free time to the game. In Wrath, Blizz made the initial encounters (normal 5-mans -> heroic 5-mans -> raids) too easy, and left hardcore, and especially hardcore/skilled, players, with little to do. In Cataclysm, they created a leap from normals->heroics and from heroics->raids that really left casual players in the lurch, as suddenly each step required a much more significant time commitment regardless of skill. Neither option really worked, although the latter arguably is worse for the game and the company as few of the hardcore players abandoned WoW under Wrath for this reason. Hardcore players are unlikely to dump WoW because they are more addicted and are also more likely to pay for WoW plus additional games rather than choose only 1-2 subscriptions.

Ultimately, I would say these mistakes reflect a basic misunderstanding of the lives and personalities of their subscribers on the part of Blizzard (which I find surprising), or perhaps, in a more nuanced way, a lack of understanding for how to design content for the full spectra of subscribers. Basically, Blizzard has only been designing for a simple binary understanding of their customers -- casual versus hardcore. The thought process goes that casual players will all like the low-time-commitment features, and hardcore will all like the higher commitment features. I would respond that, at the least, they should understand instead that there are two spectra of players: casual/hardcore, and unskilled/skilled. Note that while the c/h difference is largely time-based, I recognize that unskilled/skilled is overly simplistic -- is a player who is brilliant at manipulating the auction house more or less "skilled" than a player who knows and can enact every strategy for Alterac Valley or the newest tier of raids? This is a weakness in the argument, but generally speaking I think you understand my meaning. Anyway, I hypothesize that under Cata, Blizzard has primarily lost players who are skilled (and therefore are bored by low-skill content, like normals or other faceroll content) but have little time to commit to grinding, be it reputations, time-intensive tradeskills or raids. In effect, Blizzard has shown that they do not know how to design content for skilled players who have little time -- they can design content for the other three categories on these two spectra.

As of now, we are given no indication whether this would or would not change in MoP. However, let me offer my own answer -- in Cata, I was bored by grinding, and in the past 7-8 months the professional and personal events in my life have prevented me from doing so in any case, hence I am no longer a subscriber. As for MoP, sure, it interests me... but I fully expect that Blizzard will still not have learned how to provide casual gamers a fulfilling entry into the endgame content, which, one way or another, will still require grinding. By the same token, other ways to enjoy the game with a character at max-level, i.e. the upcoming "pet battles" or the current option of leveling alts, simply isn't as interesting to me. Therefore, at this point I see little reason to resubscribe, though I occasionally get a wild hair and consider it. If I don't have time to enjoy the level 85 content as designed, then, unless that radically changes under MoP, it would rather be a waste of money for me.

Rather, I prefer to invest my gaming time, such as it is, into other games. I'm still playing Rift, but those of you who have also been in Rift didn't know it, since I'm only playing 1-5 hours per week in the middle of the night your time (I am right now 10 hours ahead of US Mountain, but since the US and Russia have changed their time regimes in the past year, this oscillates between 9 and 10 throughout the year). Rift has many of the same issues as WoW (surprise, surprise), but I am enjoying leveling one character, I enjoy the fact that some features that were annoying me in WoW are not present here (primarily, the inability to compete with hardcore gamers on the AH -- though Rift's economy has its own problems), and I am not bored from grinds since I'm not that advanced. Like many of you, I expect to play SW:TOR, especially as they are following Trion in offering a worldwide server option. I hope to see some of you occasionally on your US server, though due to the time difference I'll probably be level 1 for months I'll probably try to play a bit more seriously on a European server, but again, I don't have much gaming time anyway.

I hope this long rant makes some sense as an objective review and personal reflection on Cata. I would still like to see my worgen druid hit 85 or 90... but there's also other things to do, unfortunately It also seems that almost none of our standard crew are on with any frequency right now anyway.

[Grimblast]

*wall of text crits your psyche for 5,000,000^10 damage!*
I hear ya! After my 6 month hiatus and coming back, I was dreading doing instancing since I didn't have my usual goonies to do them with. *enter Oz and Jay* They started up a horde side guild on Terenas which I've been rolling with them over the past few weeks. The enjoyment of WOW for me right now involves killing people alliance side in PVP and experience the content at a much slower pace since I'm in no hurry to check it all out. I like this concept Blizzard has of pushing expansions in 1 year increments because that means we casual people that are still playing the old content to catch up will be able to play through and eventually see all the content with the little time we have available. As it stands, I think I only get maybe 5 hours in a week if I'm lucky because I'm working on other projects so I can be ready for that SWTOR.

Granted, Blizzard did sucker me in with the annual subscription but that's because I figured I can play WOW at my own pace(and free Diablo 3), and I still like killing certain unnamed alliance players on Terenas with my horde character. I do feel bad when I kill someone I know I like but they are a victim of the battlegrounds/world pvp. Most of my time will go to Star Wars when it rolls in December obviously. After my 6 month break from WOW, I realized that an MMO keeps me from spending too much money on other games. I spent too much on other games but I'm finding the quality of some games out there is just not long enough or hard enough. Granted, Steam provides a nice avenue of cheap games if you catch the right specials but I think an MMO keeps my spending in check so playing WOW and SWTOR shouldn't be too bad for me. One of these Saturdays or Sundays I'll hop on and see if I can't catch you in the wee hours of the night or morning my time. See if we can just shoot the shit!

[Zancarius]

Mists isn't going to pull me back into WoW at this point, because I'm done with MMOs--the time investment is just too great. There's other reasons, of course, but the lack of excitement I held for Cataclysm and the gut feel that Mists will be more of the same isn't likely to help. I think Blizzard's taking a hopeful shot in the dark, and if you consider the circumstances, they don't have much choice: Their subscriber base is slowly diminishing, competition is growing, their IP is aging, and Diablo III is still many months out.

Also, I'm no longer really part of the WoW demographic anymore. I wasn't fond of Cataclysm, and you know what? It doesn't matter precisely because I'm not the target market. I'd even step out on a limb and suggest that Tirian isn't either based on his other posts; if you don't have the time to invest, your next best option is to take your votes (money) and go elsewhere.

I've been enjoying my time in Minecraft and a handful of other games since I quit playing, and I'm reminded that the reason I used to like single player games so much was precisely because of the lack of time commitment and the ability to pause and do something else. You don't have that in an MMO, generally speaking, because you're invariably stuck in a situation where other people are relying on your presence to complete a particular task. This social pressure is what makes an MMO successful, of course, and there's not really anything inherently wrong with that as long as you're aware that WoW shares more in common with gambling than it does StarCraft.

Plus, it's been a long time since I went back to some of the single player games and game types I enjoy. It's nice to take the time to rediscover your roots, but once Minecraft 1.0-release comes out I'm going to be building like a crazed fool. I have plans in store for that.

[Grimblast]

Assuming Notch gets on the ball! Some of us have stopped playing Minecraft so we don't have to rebuild after his big update! He needs to get'er done so we can start up that survival action again with actual real danger. I did enjoy our craft world but I don't feel like my life is really in danger there. It did give me some ideas for the world we will fire up for the big patch though.

[Zancarius]

MC 1.0 is supposed to release later this month alongside (or after) Minecon. They've been in a feature freeze for a while now, but since they're a small company I don't really expect that they'll be able to push out a new version as quickly as I would otherwise like.