As I inch ever closer to level 60, one thing is clear: Warcraft is becoming more EQ-esque. That might not be, necessarily, a bad thing, but the happy happy joy joy game that Warcraft was from levels 1 through 50 is being replaced with a “you damn well better find some more people to do this instance because what you got here ain’t gonna cut it and why in the world did you bring a warlock along?” game.

Making do won’t do much longer.

The rest of my gang of e-thugs seems to realize this also. We’re currently shopping for other guilds and players worth a damn for the tougher encounters. In a game where a large portion of the population are fresh recruits to the wonderful world of gaming, this can be problematic.

Frankly, we’re willing to settle for a few players that won’t rob us blind and will sporadically pop a heal or apply some DPS. That they would also know how to arrive at the encounter safely, timely and PREPARED seems too much to hope for at this point.

We’ve considered creating an army of alts to pick up the slack, but who has the energy for that nowadays and that’s so three games ago.

The transition has been every so slight … gently nudging us away from solo and duo quests into requiring full, balanced groups to get the uber … one day, we’ll login and it’s back to 2002 with scheduled raids and not enough damn clerics to get the show on the road.

Eventually, all games arrive at a state of EQness.

All games I choose seem to anyways. Maybe, therein lies the problem.

Before we engaged an elite mob, we used to shout, “FOR THE HORDE!”, although that made no sense at all as we’re Alliance. Now we shout, “u china?”

It’s like a fucking plague.

At least in EQ, They (meaning the ebay’ing collective They) had the decency to keep it on the down low. In this game, it couldn’t get any more mainstream unless they slapped an astronaut on it with an MTv flag.

I wonder how much longer we have to pretend this isn’t happening.

Until then, ++++!!! (which loosely translated is: buff me, love me, gimme the good stuff.)

Another lag-o-riffic weekend in World of Warcraft, (server down! server down!), and a few interesting issues cropped up that I was tracking with my l337 forum stalking skills. You might wonder why I would stalk the forum instead of play the game — you might not wonder, no difference, because I’m going to tell you anyways — Warcraft fucked me over a couple times this weekend so while I was fuming, I’d go forum stalk.

Nothing new, just a couple of buggy quests that, for some reason unbeknownst to even me, I kept trying to redo to PROVE to myself that they were, in fact, bugged. O ya, and a kinda sorta uber item I was selling on the Auction House that vanished into the nether regions of Lag. Enjoy the adventure!

Back to the forum stalking: Seems there might be a bit of a problem with dice rolling in Warcraft. Players reporting group members rolling multiple 100s out of /random 1-100 and other group members consistently winning /randoms over a few hours of playtime. Now I’m not a big believer in anecdotal evidence, ESPECIALLY in MMOGs, and I haven’t witnessed this bit of mathematical nonsense yet, but the odds are astronomically against those streaks being anything but hacks.

If the reports are true, that is. Obviously, they could be false, but I have seen some very odd things in Warcraft. Very odd, indeed.

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