Nov 09 2010

The Worst Sins In Raiding

Survey any raider on the worst offenses one of their fellow raiders can commit, and you will generally find they fall under one of the following four categories. While no raider is perfect, a good player will always be aware of how their behaviour affects their teammates and will make good effort to make sure these sins do not occur.

Making People Wait On You

Time rules a raider’s schedule. Whether it’s getting that one last attempt in before calling it for the night or plowing through trash to get to the boss, everything is balanced around the amount of time a raid gets together each lockout period. Time is the most precious commodity a raider can have and nothing makes people angrier than those who waste it for everyone.

Sins:
• Showing up late
• Taking excessive AFKs
• Waiting until immediately before start time to buy flasks or gems, set up addons, or get enchants.
• Failure to travel to instance in advance and expecting a summons

Being Unrealiable

Raiding, like many sports, is all about teamwork. Raiders rely and count on each other, and the mark of a good raid is making your strengths work together and balancing out each other’s weaknesses. Unreliable people erode the framework of cooperation at the foundation. If a player can’t count on his teammate, the raid’s performance stunted and resentment festers between members.

Sins:
• Having a poor internet connection
• Failure to respond to the calendar invites
• Habit of not showing up when promised
• Being distracted during raid time

Showing An Obvious Lack of Effort For Your Role

Although being a good raider means being able to work well with your raiding peers, every player has an individual responsibility to prepare him to contribute to the group as best they can. This means doing research on the class you play, the instance you’ll be visiting and your roles and duties within. A good player will be proactive about reading guides and strategies, monitoring patch notes for changes and keeping up with relevant theorycrafting and always showing up for a raid prepared.

Sins:
• Failure to keep gear gemmed and enchanted
• Ignorance about class playstyle
• Lack of research on boss strategies or guides
• Showing up in the wrong spec or gear
• Didn’t bring proper consumables or reagents

Bad Attitude

By sheer virtue of being an activity that involves working closely with other people for many hours of the week, raiding is a highly social activity. While knowledge and skill may rule a raid’s success, the attitude of a raid controls how happy the players are with that group. People who harm the social dynamics of a raid are like a poison, causing disharmony, hurt feelings, a tense atmosphere and making raiding feel more like work than a hobby.

Sins:
• Blaming other people constantly
• Excessively offering unsolicited advice and critiques
• Being mean, rude, or belittling teammates
• Whoring loot at the expense of others
• Dominating voice chat constantly
• Inability communicate issues in a constructive fashion.

Sep 13 2010

Raid Preparation Checklist

An hour ‘til. Check:

  • Put the kids to bed, send your girlfriend home, tell Aunt Lucille that you’ll call her back tomorrow, let the dog out, take your smoke break.
  • Have you spec’d back to a raiding spec and spoken with the trainer?
  • Got all your glyphs?
  • Fill any empty gem sockets and make sure your new stuff enchanted.
  • Dump stuff you don’t need in the bank to make room for PhatLootz™.
  • Have you read the weekly post and the strategy guide?
  • Make sure all your add-ons updated, set-up and working.
  • Bring your dinner of cheesepuffs & Dr. Pepper to your desk. If necessary, bring enough additional puffs to cover snacks and dessert. Make sure you have enough napkins to wipe down the keyboard when you spill so you don’t need to get up in the middle of a boss fight.

Invites are begining. Check:

  • Be on the appropriate character and join your raiding channels.
  • Do you have enough flasks or elixirs appropriate to your class/spec?
  • Make sure you have enough potions of all the types you’ll need.
  • Refill your personal stock of buffing food in case no one has prepared any feasts.
  • Check your bags for that resist gear or off-set spec.
  • How is your supply of bandages? If low, have you prepared a bribe for a healer?
  • Confirm that you have an adequate supply of drinking water, in case of no mage.
  • Are you carrying enough reagents, be they purchased or fashioned from souls?
  • Are you on Ventrilo and in the right channel?
  • Get on the bird to the dungeon entrance.

Five minutes ‘til pull. Check:

  • Are you in the instance, next to your buddies, in front of the night’s first target?
  • Eat your buffing food, take your elixirs, apply your self buffs.
  • Quick gear re-check to make sure you aren’t still wielding Last Month’s Mutton.
  • Have you buffed people, dropped a table or soulwell, or offered to help summon the remaining stragglers?
  • Get in position, prepare for the pull, be awesome.
Jul 13 2010

Nostalgia Gives People Rose-Tinted Glasses

I see a lot of requests on the official Suggestion forums asking for Blizzard to make special servers with the time rolled back to Classic or Burning Crusade. These requests often come with sharp critiques of the current expansion(s), going as far as to accuse them of “ruining WoW.” I see this even more with Cataclysm looming, where some of the quests and zones responsible for our fondest WoW memories will be going away.  And while I will miss those reminders of early WoW, largely I think nostalgia gives people rose-tinted glasses.

I remember classic WoW.

I remember because there was not much to do at 60, Blizzard drew out the leveling process by filling it full of tedious “busy work” that was designed to be time consuming but without the advantage of being more fun or interesting or even having better rewards.  They did this by doing things like sending you running (literally) all the way across the world to talk to someone, only to have them send you back again.  To further this goal, travel was intentionally made slower than hell.  You didn’t get your first mount until level 40 and even then it was the slow one.  People think it’s “too easy” that we get our mounts earlier and cheaper now?  Well, I’ll counter that my gaming experience was not enhanced, nor did I become a better player, from the “challenge” of running the full length of Azeroth on foot.

I remember having to sit at the computer through long taxi trips because you had to reboard the bat at every flight stop, which was aggravated by long, inefficient travel paths that often circled back on themselves or took long detours.

I remember if you talked a friend into joining the game to play with you, well, you better make a new toon to play with him because it’s going to be months and months before he catches up with your main… if he doesn’t get burnt out trying to do so and quit before then.  And boy, you better hope you like that class you’re leveling as much as you did when you made it, because if you have any semblance of a life, it’s unlikely you’ll have the time or energy to reroll after you’ve hit the level cap.

I remember doing long quest chains or completing arduous journeys only to be rewarded with a [white] item or something absurd like a +spirit 2h axe.  Some slots, like trinkets and necklaces, were just very hard to find in general.  I began raiding, as a rogue, with the +dodge Alterac Valley pvp trinket and the damage absorption one from Araj the Summoner because little out there was better.

I remember the amount of crap you had to carry back then.  Everyone’s bag space was filled up by reagents, specialty tools and class-unique items, not to mention materials needed for professions.  Of course, many common items only stacked in tiny quantities, if at all.  Many of your bag slots were also permanent inhabited by other crucial items like keys. Forget even carrying fun items like pets or more than one mount, which originally occupied bag slots unlike today.  And professions?  I remember items that gave you bonus to +skinning but were not skinning knives so you had to carry both, and mining picks that you could not mine with.  I remember when you had to keep every level of enchanting rod.  Of course, you probably never used those low-level enchants anyway because the profession UI didn’t used to have a search feature to find them even if you wanted to.

I remember missing entire dungeons leveling up, or else having to wait until everything was grey or green so three of us could underman the place, because it was next to impossible to find groups with the laughable LFG chat. Additionally, if you weren’t part of the first pack of people to hit 60, it was really hard to even find people to do “end game” dungeons as well; after so many 45 minute Baron runs, attunement chains, fire resist farming, or just from running them a million times because there wasn’t much else to do, everyone would rather eat glass than visit those places again to help you.

And I remember when running a single dungeon a full evening’s commitment, and even then you often didn’t finish.  I remember that it took a significant portion of time to traverse the map to get to their locations because summoning stones didn’t exist, and once there you could expect to spend four or five hours inside, much of that time spent being lost or mindlessly killing (or rekilling after they respawned) packs of trash.  Worse yet, we had to run some of them (like BRD) many, many times to get the gear and attunements and keys we needed before we could even think about doing cooler things.

I remember the ungodly long run back to Blackrock Mountain after a wipe.  Ask yourself, is it challenging to waste a quarter of your raid time because the run back after a wipe takes ten minutes, or is maybe just frustrating for no good reason?  Blackrock wasn’t the only offender; I remember dozens of other places where the nearest graveyard, flightpath, inn or mailbox was obnoxiously far away for no apparent reason.  You spent more time being inconvenienced by little things than actually playing the parts of the game that were fun.

I remember raiding was the only way to better yourself at 60, and unless you found a (large!) guild to do that with, it was farming twilight’s hammer in Silithus or grinding undead in Eastern Plaguelands to do, and that was pretty much it.  Practically every epic in the game was only available through devoted raiding.  There were no crafted or reputation based ones that a dedicated person could work towards on their own with effort.  If you didn’t have time to raid or know enough people, you might as well just cancel your subscription once you hit 60.  There were few solo activities, no dailies, no achievements, no titles, no cool rewards to unlock.

And for every person I hear pine for classic raiding, I remember a dozen people who swore if they ever saw lava again it would be too soon.  People frequently described Molten Core with the same adjectives they might use to talk about a kick to the groin.  I remember raids being a logistical nightmare to wrangle 40 people, although this was partly made easier by the fact that half of them only had to be “warm bodies” and there wasn’t really any need to contribute more than that.  Difficulty was often related to abhorrent resistance gear checks, aggro problems from white damage, or the aforementioned logistic struggles, rather than impressive and challenging strategies requiring teamwork and skilled execution.

I remember armor pieces, including class sets, being itemised as if they let a monkey pull random stats out of a hat.  Holy paladin wearing agility or a warrior with spirit?  Of course.  You wore armor with stats that were useless to you, because that’s all there was.  Dungeon sets had +armor bonuses, whether you were a tank or a healer or a mage, and nothing was oriented towards a particular spec or playstyle or role.

I remember most classes only had one spec they could play on for PvE and many of those being just one trick ponies.  If you were a shaman, you were resto and it was just because your raid needed you to drop mana tide for the real healers.  Rogues were combat, warriors were tanks, and druids could do a wide variety of things poorly.  Shadow priest?  Ret paladin?  In PvE?  You’re joking, right?  Of course, the revelation that the class you picked may be laughably bad would often only be discovered after you’ve already invested months of work into getting it to the level cap.  Surprise!

I remember when talent trees were littered with stupid talents like rogue’s (original) throwing specialization or parry for hunters, or were totally schizophrenic like shaman’s enhancement tree where you would take absurd talents to improve your shield block because it was, ironically, a prerequisite to the tier that taught you to use two handed weapons.  Even if a particular talent tree had avoided containing useless talents, there was no guarantee it would be a balanced and playable spec choice.

I remember when there were no mage tables, soulwells, or summoning portals, and we brought those classes so they could spend the first thirty minutes of our raid just making water and cookies or summoning people one by one.  Mages were glorified venting machines, warlocks summonbots.

I remember when HoTs didn’t stack and only one healer in the raid could use them.  I remember when they increased the boss debuff limit from 8 to 16, but people had to be careful what they put on the boss lest it push off something more important.  I remember being a rogue who used sharpening stones instead of poisons for that reason.  I remember five minute paladin blessings.  I remember when hunters couldn’t trap in combat and feign death killed them if they did it for too long.  I remember when group buffs and max rank spells could only be learned from raid-drop books.

I remember before Guild banks and linked auction houses.  I remember nicknames like “Lagrimmar” and being nearly incapable of playing in those cities on even the newest machine due to the horrible crowding and resulting server latency.

I remember being so poor at 60 because there were no dailies to balance out my gold loss from raiding repair bills.  I had no epic horse because the only way to get one was to spend my precious little time in-game grinding mob after mob after mob for coins or playing ebay on the auction house just to get enough money to buy it.  My epic PvP mount sat in my bank until Burning Crusade, when I could finally afford to learn it.

I remember waiting hours and hours to get a single battleground match – if I was lucky enough to get one at all; I also remember sometimes logging off after hours of playing and never seeing the match pop.

I remember each faction arguing – justifiably — that the other had an edge in PvE and/or PvP because they didn’t even have access to the same classes, buffs and abilities, including staple buffs like Kings, Might and Wisdom.

I remember when you had to install addons to get many things that are base functionality now, like more than one action bar, auto-loot, scrolling combat text, and all the other great addon features that WoW took and made standard, including snazzier things like boss warnings, voice chat, threat management, instance maps, and gear-set management.  I remember the original chat window and auction house interface. I remember before you could shift-click links of quests and items into chat and before you could track quests on the side of your screen.  I remember the time before target-of-target.  I remember when they added the “dressing room” and the ability to buyback things you’d accidentally sold.

That’s not to say classic WoW wasn’t fun.  It very much was and we wouldn’t have stuck around if it wasn’t.  By pointing out the negatives, I’m not denying all the positives, too: The communities were smaller and more tight-knit. End game wasn’t so much of a gear-grind.  Getting a level felt like an achievement, and not just one minus on the “needed until 80” race, and hitting the cap was something to be really proud of.  Epics really were epic.

But the point is that as time passes, we remember these nice things we may have lost, but often overlooked how much really, really positive stuff we have gained, and all the great refinement on gameplay and the many additional features that have really enhanced our gaming experience.  I’m not saying I hate classic WoW, I’m saying – Wow!  Look at how far we’ve come!

Overall, the main problem with vanilla WoW was that it was stagnant.  It took a lot of time to reach the end, but once you did, there were only so many things you could do until you finished all there was to do, which wasn’t hard to do before long.  After that point, it was boring and it caused a lot of disinterest from people who had up until that point invested a lot into the game.  The only solution to this was to add more stuff, which Blizzard did and continues to do every time the content gets tired.  Do we miss the old content and some of the great things that were a part of it?   Sure.  But, at the end of the day, it seems fairly obvious to me that we’re where we are because of necessity to keep this game alive and compelling.  Demands for classic servers and critiques of the concept of expansions are shortsighted because they ignore this very critical fact.  Even if you’re one of those people who pines for the original game, you have to acknowledge all the positive changes and additions that Blizzard has made over the years.