Tag Archives: warcraft

Oversharing

Posted on by
19

Yesterday I was kicked out of my guild raid before liftoff. I will say, the kick was entirely deserved. I get tired of sitting around outside the raid zone waiting on the last 1/3 of the raid to show up. But now I’m just making excuses: I was being a dick, I got kicked for being a dick, end of story.

Anyways, I spent my newfound free time snooping around rival guild sites and rediscovered an internet phenomenon that is both amusing and disturbing: oversharing.

Contemporary example from gaming: “It figures that the day some girl is in my bed wanting me I can’t even perform. Thinking about it today I thought it was kinda funny, so I just figured I’d share. On a serious note though I believe I am going to have to take a break from WoW.”

I blame social networking for the steep rise in oversharing. Honestly, I have deep thoughts maybe a couple of times a day, the rest of the thinking is just noise and doesn’t even hold my own interest. Social network sites encourage people to share absolutely everything and I think people should self-censor the more graphic details, PARTICULARLY when one is speaking to one’s guildmates or servermates or the internet at large.

And yet, people share it all. Anonymity grants courage, I suppose.

What I want from you are your own examples of gaming friends or acquaintances oversharing — or, if you’re feeling clever, invent an example of gross oversharing in a game environment.

I’ll go first. Back in EverQuest, raiding Vex Thal, one of our female priests left the raid after a few hours because she was pregnant and her hemorrhoids were bothering her. My opinion, then and now, “I’m not feeling well” would have been sufficient. The bright side: she didn’t detail HOW they were bothersome.

Another example, also EQ, one of our druids announced that she had asked her husband for a divorce earlier that day. The story could have ended there. She explained, however, that he had gotten home late from work and when she went to kiss him, she could smell another woman’s **censored** on his face. I had no response to that.

Your turn to share … but not too much.

And the Warlocks Wept

Posted on by
16

If I still was a PVPing shadow priest, or if I had ever been a PVPing warlock, I would not be happy about this change at all:

In the next major content patch, the combat rating, resilience, will also reduce the damage dealt by damage over time (DoT) effects. As it currently stands, each new tier of equipment adds to the amount of damage DoT abilities have, yet that damage is not mitigated through combat ratings found on typical equipment. This change will help ensure that DoT effects do not scale too well compared to other damage mechanics.

The amount of damage reduced will be equal to the critical chance reduction effect that resilience grants. Love, Eyonix

(I added the Love signature because that’s what the World of Warcraft needs now.)

While the warlock and shadow priest tears sustain us, I’m wondering: what can be done to revitalize a mature game?

Let’s be blunt, Warcraft PVE is aging like a president, and no matter how anyone spins the subscription numbers, players and guilds are losing interest. PVP, for many players, is a pleasant diversion from the grindiness of PVE, and, I’d wager, fixing/changing/adding PVP is a helluva lot cheaper than any PVE changes. I’d PVP more myself, but it’s too damn expensive to swap between a PVP and PVE talent spec every few days — not to mention the paperwork involved.

I’m just thinking out loud in e-print, but this game needs something. Well-spun subscription numbers aside, we can all see the attrition around us, and even though there’s lots of interesting ideas on how to energize this game … my opinion, Blizzard is too plodding and too stubborn to try those interesting ideas any time soon.

So choose your poison, Warcraft player: PVP, Raiding PVE, Heroics x 1 billion, or the alt lifestyle. It’s a long wait until the next expansion … or Warhammer Online.

The School of Hard Knocks In Session

Posted on by
16

Sometimes, I enjoy watching the optimism of youth. Y’know, when I’ll warn someone in game to watch him or herself (and their virtual money) around the server jagoff and youth will tell me that I “just don’t know the server jagoff, he really is a nice person and a good player.” Or, that “Server jagoff USED to be a jagoff but now he’s changed.”

Ya. I love optimism like that because it means they’re about to get a lesson from the school of hard knocks.

Like this lesson. Remember several months ago I told you about the World of Warcraft rogue that stole the bank from the Unguildables guild? (Parts I and II) Briefly, this rogue kept applying to join our guild and we kept denying him, so he formed his own guild out of the server’s unguildable players — those prone to drama or ninja’ing — then he did a late-night server transfer with the guild bank and told the Unguildables he had cut a deal with my guild for all of the them to join all of us in happy raid land.

I may have also told you (maybe I didn’t though), he returned to our server on a level one noobie rogue WITH THE SAME NAME as his thief character and was chatting it up with the crowd in Ironforge.

This is how that night went down. A few of us are sitting around in Ironforge after the night’s 40-man raid, marveling that our guild can kill anything with some of the “talent” we have, and I see in /say his noobie rogue chatting with a couple of our guild (ALLEGEDLY) female players. Let’s say his rogue is named Beneful.

Me: /officer wtf. is that fucking beneful?
Officer channel: He transferred. Remember?? He stole that guild bank.
Me: /officer Well I’m looking right at him in Ironforge. Who the fuck else would name their character with that dumass name?
Officer channel: Wow. That’s ballsy.
Me: (to one of the females chatting with him) Is that fucking beneful?
Her: teehee ya. He made a level 1 to chat with people. He’s lonely on his new server.
Me thinks: Musta run out of money.

Ordinarily, in this situation I’d be on high alert to carefully scour any rogue applicant to keep his thieving ass out of the guild, but as we hadn’t tagged a new rogue since 2005, high alert seemed unwarranted.

Continue reading →