Tag Archives: world of warcraft

Epics for Tigole’s Mom!

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You’ve probably read last Saturday’s New York Times interview with Warcraft’s lead designer Tigole, known offline as Mrs. Kaplan’s son Jeff. (NYT link for those returning from a lost weekend)

A little background, if you don’t follow the gaming gossip rags as closely as you should, Tigole was an EQ catasser and behemoth guildleader of some note who joined Blizzard a few years back, worked his way through the ranks to lead designer, and is now pumping out endgame content.

Back to the NYT interview that Tigole really wishes he hadn’t done, here’s the salient paragraph:

Q. Why not just let casual players get rewards comparable to those from raids?

A. It would be almost impossible for us to do, and this is a philosophical decision. We need to put a structure in place for players where they feel that if they do more difficult encounters, they’ll get rewarded for it. As soon as we give more equal rewards across the board, for a lot of players it will diminish the accomplishment of killing something like Nefarian. My favorite times in the development cycle are when there are encounters that are close to being defeated but have not yet been beaten. It really creates a sense of awe among the players that there is something big and truly dangerous in the world. But it would be very disappointing if the items found on Nefarian were the same thing you could get in your nightly Stratholme run. [Stratholme is a much easier five-person dungeon.]

Cue a million forum posts and a dozen or more blog commentaries.

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Week of Fives: Day One

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… and we’re back.

Few changes ’round here: site upgraded to WordPress 2.0 (die evil hackers and evil spammers and evil spamming hackers!) and latest version of K2. Miss a day, miss a lot of site fixes! Just like MMOGs, blog software is perpetually in beta, so there may be broken stuff. I’ll get ’round to it eventually. Just like devs.

This week’s project: a different kind of Look Back at the Year 2005, which I will call the Week of Fives. Each day, you will find a list of five persons, places or things from 2005 that I want to remember FOREVER. When I get to the end of my life, not only do I want to think “Man, I really squandered my time on Earth”, but also I want to remember that I squandered that time mostly in games. Then I’ll die without giving away my stuff. Ha!

Today, Five Hated Players on My Warcraft Server:

1. The “I’m the smartest person on the Realm Forums” guy. I’m sure you have one of these guys on your WoW-EQ-EQII-UO-GW-SWG-etc servers, too, so you know the type. He responds to absolutely every thread AND authors a billion others dealing with the same topics raised in the original threads. If only he could confine himself to one thread per day, how much easier our lives would be.

Anyways, my forum whore likes to trot out this little stat each time he gets pwned via realm forum: I’m probably the smartest person on these boards. Then he’ll cite all of his almost-complete education credits, which he would have completed except the schools (yes, that’s plural) fucked him over.

But that’s not all! I know this guy in game, too. (Lucky me) He monopolizes the general chat channel with his unsolicited wisdom and advice where he has almost-credentials too: I was in the top guild on this server (till it imploded from drama THAT HE CREATED), I’m in the new top guild on this server (currently in implosion mode from drama THAT HE CREATED) and I’ve killed every mob that’s ever been.

Please. Die. Now.

This has been my passive-aggressive strat for dealing with this hosebag: every day before raid time, I take him off my ignore list. I go about my business in Ironforge prepping for the raid. If I see even one line of text come from his character before I fly out or when I fly back post-raid, I /ignore him. Even one “lol”, /ignore. Zero tolerance. Almost every day, he sees on his own screen “FotonRogue is now ignoring you.” Drives him nuts.

Sometimes he’ll have his friend (yes, that’s singular) bitch at me about the daily /ignores, but I just /ignore him too … until the next day, when the /ignore dance begins anew.

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Maintenance Day renamed Molten Tuesday

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The Warcraft raid instance timers will be changed with Patch 1.9. Caydiem explains it all:

In 1.9, the way raid timers are handled will undergo a significant change. The new system will have all instances reset at a certain server time, regardless of when you were actually saved to the instance. The reset times are as follows:

* Molten Core: Every 7 Days, resetting during weekly maintenance.
* Blackwing Lair: Every 7 Days, resetting during weekly maintenance
* Temple of Ahn’Qiraj (40-man): Every 7 Days, resetting during weekly maintenance
* Onyxia: Every 5 Days
* Zul’Gurub: Every 3 Days
* Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj (20-man): Every 3 Days

The resets, if not during weekly maintenance, are planned to occur during off-hours when the least amount of raids are active. We plan on implementing a calendar of sorts on the website to help you better plan out your particular raid schedule. There are many reasons why this particular approach was chosen; we’ve gone over a multitude of options and felt that this change would be best in the long run.

As the reset time approaches (<24 hours til the reset, I believe), if you are in the instance, you will be informed of the impending reset every hour on the hour. 15 minutes before the reset, the reminders become more frequent; once the reset time is reached, all players in the instance will be ported to their bind point. You can access your saved raid status at any time via /raidinfo, and you will be informed of your status regarding an instance when you zone into the dungeon.

We know that this change is a major one for raiding guilds; we’ve done our utmost to make the reset times as convenient as possible for the majority of our players. All saved instances will be reset when 1.9 goes live to accommodate this change.

So, basically, everyone and their imaginary little brothers will be in Molten Core Tuesday night, after a brief visit to Onyxia, of course. Wednesday and Thursday will be Blackwing Lair nights, although some guilds will be doing mop up in MC, and the weekends will be Onyxia Redux. Depending on your Blackwing speed, and/or tenacity, pillage that new-fangled Temple on Thursday and Friday … add Saturday, Sunday if it’s a particularly “wipey” zone.

What was once the Sunday/Monday lag crush will become the Tuesday Disco. Hell, we won’t need a calendar for that.

(Naturally, that Temple will take priority the first few weeks — remember Foton’s golden rule of new content: get the loot while the getting’s good. Hotfixes are your enemy.)

Oh yes. I ostensibly forgot about ZulGrub and the new (also 20-man) Ruins of Somethingorother.

Our guild leaves the 20-mans for the overflow guildies that couldn’t get a spot in the MC+ runs. We’re nice like that. Outdoor dragons, same thing. “Sure, c’mon out here hunters and rogues! Ok, not you rogues, but hunters, come one, come all. You come too, priest that’s always AFK. And you too, out of combat rezzing paladin. The feral druids wouldn’t get anywhere without you!”

What are they talking about we don’t share?? That’s sharing!