Spoiled Brats

A few nights ago, our alt army was waiting at the appointed quest area for the last arrival, one of the Alt Warriors.

We’ve been more than patient with Alt Warrior, but he pulls this crap almost every night: check the Auction House 43 times for any level 30-ish uber, check a few more times for level 40-ish uber (to prepare for next week), then beg the guild enchanter to log on and enchant his new shit.

He’s got to be almost out of gold on his main; he completely changes over his warrior gear that often. While gold is much easier to come by at level 60, our alts aren’t producing much revenue — they aren’t even self-sufficient yet — and the mains are too busy babysitting to get out in the field and produce.

He finally arrives in Stranglethorn Vale, takes one look at the designated rogue babysitter, and balks. He wants the 60 hunter to cover quests until the alts have mounts because of the group run buff.

(As if he’ll be able to afford a mount for that spoiled brat of a warrior.)

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Need More Regulations and Less Traffic

Today I had a thought. Ya, just one all day — I’m slow like that.

Does anybody ever audit the sales figures quoted in press releases? Does anyone even have that authority?

If the company is required to have an audit each year, presumably you could confirm the sales figures if their income statement had sufficient detail, but what if not? Or what if the gaming division is a small portion of a huge entertainment conglomerate? Again, the detail might be insufficient to confirm the publicized sales.

Concurrent connections are usually vastly different from quoted box sales, so looking at census figures wouldn’t help much. Given the right set of circumstances, and within believable limits, a gaming company could substantially pad their sales figures for the press release.

Just saying.

This is the type of evil scheme that preoccupies my thoughts when stuck in evening traffic.

Game Enhancement Day

Yesterday was Patch Day in the World of Warcraft and besides the still-shitty (although improving!) patching system and besides the fixes/nerfs/changes that weren’t disclosed in the patch notes, everywhere the talk was about the Paladins and their unfortunate collision with the nerfbat.

Here is the *intended* fix, per the published patch notes (erroneously dated for 2/04/05, the original patch date. I just won’t even get into it because I tire of the buffoonery):

Paladin

Seal of the Crusader: Fixed a bug where damage per swing was increasing instead of decreasing when Seal of the Crusader was active. This resulted in a dramatic increase in damage per second (DPS) that was unintended. The tooltip for the spell displays the intent of the spell:

“Fills the Paladin with the spirit of a crusader, granting additional attack power. The Paladin also attacks faster, but deals less damage with each attack.”

The overall increase in DPS from Seal of the Crusader should only result from the increase in attack power and not from the increase in attack speed. We understand this is a significant decrease in the power of this spell, but was a necessary bug fix to ensure both overall game balance and the viability of different Paladin Seals.

Ok, I guess. Seems to be some conflicting wording there … but I’ve learned to just nod my head and pretend I have some (any) idea what Blizzard is up to.

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