Repairing Gears #3: WoW Guild System, Part 4
2007-03-02 01:48:02
Time for the fourth installment of the Repairing Gears
on World of Warcraft’s guild system. I said this one would cover guild halls, and it will, but first a quick note that I thought I put in an earlier installment but must have missed.
Officer MOTD.
The current MOTD (Message of the Day) for the guild is nice, but I’ve always wanted to be able to set aside a second one where only officers (or those with proper permissions) can see the message.
Let’s head back to guild halls again though and recap while doing so.
In the second part of the article I talked about guild banks and what they should be, what they should have in them, this would be one feature of the guild hall, and in my mind, the most important. Two weeks ago (I missed last week’s installment) I brought out some highlights from a topic on guild halls, and I’ll use that as the jumping point to expand on a variety of things mentioned there.
The idea of a trophy case of some sort is one that i
Read more: Guild
, System
, Repairing Gears
Endlessly Frustrating
2007-03-05 07:42:46
I hate Shadow Labyrinth. It is the quite possible the most horrid instance ever to be created in World of Warcraft. It is as if the developers stuck every frustrating mechanic and mob they could into one instance because they ran out of anything new to use to make the instance challenging. Mobs that fear…constantly? Check. Invisible mobs that pop out to gank you immediately after you pull a group of 6 others at once? Check. Huge pulls where a great deal of crowd control is necessary? Check. Mobs that consistently break crowd control techniques? Check. Pretend this is alright by giving another class a pathetic crowd control technique at level 70 that at best lasts 10 seconds? Check.
I’m not against instances that are challenging and require skill, but instances where having Fear Ward, an ability that only some priests get, is so ridiculously useful should not exist. I feel like I am setting myself up to fail if I run with a priest who isn’t a dwarf (okay, drae
Weekly Roundup 3/2/07
2007-03-04 21:07:44
We’ll skip the pleasantries this week and get right in to what happened.
On Monday I made mention of Blizzard’s plans to bring back the LFG channel, at least in a way, even though they had said it wouldn’t happen. This “fix” is really an inherently poor band-aid on the LFG problem, but that’s another story entirely.
Tuesday I was happy to be respecced to the Feral line as my Druid, putting out ridiculous amounts of damage was fun. Having been feral for about a week now though I can say I am kind of looking forward to going back to healing again. Feral is a lot of fun, but I miss Nature’s Swiftness for those “oh crap” moments.
I checked out the February edition of the Warhammer Online Newsletter on Wednesday and talked about what I hope is an interesting way of not pigeon-holing classes into a single role. Later that day I added the Highlight of the Week, focusing on the WoW site’s new feature, The Armory.
Then, on Thursday
Read more: Weekly
Another Invite Update
2007-03-06 06:10:52
I didn’t plan on doing another one of these, but then again, I didn’t plan on getting so many people who wanted invites to Dungeon Runners, so that’s just how it is.
As I’ve mentioned before, I can send out 4 at a time, and as soon as someone activates I get another one to send out. Currently I have over 30 people waiting “in line” for an invite. The number has, in fact, increased from the previous update I did. This isn’t because I haven’t sent out invites, but more because I have received more requests for invites than I can send out at a time. With people not immediately activating in all instances it takes even longer. So, I am wading my way through all the people who want an invite slowly, but I seem to get two requests for every invite I send out.
At this point, I still don’t think I will not allow any more people to ask for invites (though if I get a certain number piled up I may discontinue the offer until I can grant a
Read more: Invite
, Update
Machinima
2007-03-07 07:27:03
I’ve recently been checking out some of the videos over at the Warcraft section of Machinima
.com. For those that don’t know what machinima is, the website explains it much better than I would so check it out. I’m not highlighting a particular video…here, but i did want to bring attention to the site as there is several really great ones worth checking out. If you have a little time stop by and look it over.
Machinima, warcraft, world of warcraft, movies, blizzard
Highlight of the Week
2007-03-08 01:07:42
As you probably guessed this week’s highlight is a video from over at Machinima.com. More specifically, a World of Warcraft video. To be precise, this video. Huntology the Movie is probably one of the best put together WoW machinima videos I’ve ever watched. At some points the script seems to drop off, but on the whole it is a well developed plot and the effects and styles used to actually make the movie are top-notch.
At close to 20 minutes, it is one of the longer videos to watch straight through, but worth the time just to admire the attention to detail and the real artistry that went into the work. Aside from a minor issue with a microphone the voice acting is also among the best I heard from all the movies I watched.
Stop by the site and watch it, well worth the time.
highlight of the week, world of warcraft, machinima, Huntology the movie, wow, blizzard, world of warcraft movies, videos
Read more: Highlight
Throwin’ Down in the W-O-W For Realz
2007-03-09 07:27:10
world of warcraft, chat logs, chat, shadowmoon valley, general stupidity, funny chat, humor
Repairing Gears #4: Information Management, Part 1
2007-03-09 01:40:57
I’m changing things up this week and talking about a subject that is far more abstract than previous topics. It’s been said in interviews I’ve read (and linked to) and by the players that MMO interfaces are lacking in quality as a whole, and even more so when compared to non MMO games.
The obvious problem is so much more information is available and needs to be displayed in an MMO than in any single-player game. In the average single-player game you can push your start/menu button and pause the game, allowing you ample time to cycle through what you are looking for and do whatever you want. In an MMO there are plenty of times where this isn’t the case. The game is going to continue to go on around you even if you are scouring your inventory for that potion you need to use so the mob attacking you doesn’t kill you. Another big problem is that people play on monitors of various sizes. Those with larger monitors will probably be able to put up more in
Read more: Gears
, Management
, Repairing Gears
Grinding
2007-03-08 18:35:52
I don’t know many people that are fans of repeatedly killing the same thing over and over to increase a certain thing, in this case reputation with various factions in World of Warcraft. My main is a Skinner/Leatherworker and it seems that all the good leatherworking patterns are with the most annoying groups to get my reputation up with. Of course, I would probably be saying the opposite if I had to grind rep with others, but that’s a different matter.
My main problem is the entire idea of grinding reputation for a group, but especially when these rewards are mildly, if at all, better than what I can use. Some of the rewards at Exalted reputation are nice, but none that I think are worth the time it would take to grind that out.
Given, they did make reputation easier to get in the Burning Crusade expansion, so it isn’t nearly as much of a grind as the earlier reputations were (furbolg rep anyone?) but it is still an annoying time-sink. I know, this probably goes
Read more: Grinding
Weekly Roundup 3/9/07
2007-03-11 02:59:08
Some would argue this is a day late, which is technically correct, if you, like so many others, believe that the 9th was Friday and today is in fact Saturday. I say that’s crazy talk, but I’ve been told otherwise.
Monday had me complaining about the worst dungeon to ever be seen in a game, Shadow Labyrinth. The fact that I am still, on occasion, forced to run this god-forsaken instance disturbs me greatly.
On Tuesday I gave another update on Dungeon Runners invitations, as I seem to be creating quite the stockpile of them. I am still working my way through them but I seem to get more people trickling in each day, so I’m doing what I can to get them out.
On Wednesday I started out by leading up to my highlight of the week directing people over to Machinima.com to check out some great videos. Later in the day, I added in the Highlight of the Week, a great piece of work called Huntology the Movie, the best example I’d seen of Machinima work.
Grinding, the bane
Read more: Weekly
Further Proof
2007-03-12 16:54:51
I ran across something funny in the WoW General forums today. People are saying Cyclone is overpowered. Cyclone, for those of you who don’t know, is a level 70 Druid spell that can be used as a near worthless crowd control. It stops the enemy from doing anything for six seconds and they are also unable to be attacked. It is not dispellable. Of course, after three times the target becomes immune. The trick to this move is it lasts 6 seconds the first time, then 3, then 1.5 (ish) and then the target is immune. That’s about 10 seconds of crowd control, at best. It’s a crappy move in PvE, and only mildly useful in PvP. Sheep is a far better crowd control technique, even with it’s ability to be dispelled fairly easily. Frost Nova or even the Druids Entangling Roots ability can be much more useful against melee attackers than Cyclone. A shaman totem (sorry, I don’t remember which one, I think earthbind perhaps) can be just as useful in slowing or stop
Read more: Further
, Proof
, Further Proof
Hot 100 Developers of 2007
2007-03-13 06:02:30
Next Generation has put up a list of the big game developers of ‘07. MMOs were fairly well represented, with people from Blizzard, ArenaNet and NCSoft on the list (possibly others I missed.) I don’t know that the order they put them in is something I agree with, certainly not with their number 1 pick, but that’s a rant for another time. At any rate though, some interesting stuff and a cool list to check out. People seem to love lists so much maybe I’ll have to come up with one of my own for MMOs.
developers, top lists, mmog, mmorpg, blizzard, arenanet, ncsoft, guild wars, world of warcraft, tabula rasa, garriott
Read more: Developers
Highlight of the Week
2007-03-14 07:00:37
We’ll talk about this later.
This weeks’ Highlight
of the Week comes from the always great Kill Ten Rats. A post about MMO—s. More specifically about, well, it’s hard to pick out exactly as it seems to switch a bit. It starts out as trying to define the various types of online game and switches gears to the problems with definitions in general…or something like that.
It’s hard to pick exactly what to go on about this post, but it is a great read, and I’ll be writing a follow-up on this post later in the day, but for now, take a bit to read it over so you’ll know where I’m coming from later today.
Kill Ten Rats, MMORPG, MMOG, online games, highlight of the week
Repairing Gears Delay
2007-03-16 05:14:49
Your regularly scheduled Repairing Gears
topic for the week has been pushed back to Friday, March 16th. Due to this, the Weekly Roundup usually appearing on Friday, will be showing up on Saturday instead. On a further note, starting with next week, the Repairing Gears
topic will be put on Wednesday, instead of Thursday, and the Highlight of the Week will be moved to Thursday. This revised schedule should allow an easier time of getting each article out on its proper day, rather than having to delay or move around weekly articles in the future.
Sorry for the delay this week.
repairing gears, weekly roundup, highlight of the week, delay
Read more: Delay
Adventures in Karazhan
2007-03-15 07:09:54
Tonight my guild went into Karazhan
for our first (real) attempt (though I wasn’t along it seems some people went in last night and cleared a bit of the trash.) It didn’t go well. That’s not to say we did horribly, we just didn’t do as well as we wanted to, or as I believe we could have. Part of that was probably due to the fact that we went in with nine people. I truly believe that having an extra person would have made things easier the extra damage we could have put out would have been helpful.
Also, we didn’t pot up. It may seem silly to mention this, but a lot of other groups are going into the dungeon with a ton of consumables on them and burning them all to get through. We don’t really want to do that. It’s not a matter of not having the potions (we seem to have an endless supply of alchemists in the guild) it’s just a matter of wanting to beat content ourselves without needing the potions.
I was along. As a healer I am pro
Read more: Adventures
Repairing Gears #4: Information Management, Part 2
2007-03-17 00:15:41
I want to go over just a small portion of the information we want to display for this week’s topic. We’ll look only at the unit frames, the area that displays the health and “special” bars (mana, rage, endurance, energy, whatever) of you, party members, and your target. I promised diagrams, so I’ll go ahead and get right into them, and then wrap it up with a small tie-in of why they were designed this way.
Now, let’s take a moment and go over what’s there. The first large circle on the left side is the player information area. The outer ring is health, the second ring is whatever “special” bar should be showing and the innermost ring can be used for a couple different things. For instance, it could fill up as you gain experience in the game, or perhaps it could fill up as some sort of quest counter, for a specially designated quest in your log (as you kill “x” amount of people or collect “x” amount of i
Read more: Gears
, Management
, Repairing Gears
Weekly Roundup 3/16/07
2007-03-18 06:35:01
Had a bit of a laid back week this week, some nice weather early in the week, followed by some utterly horrible weather at the end of the week had me AFK for quite a bit.
Let’s get on with it though.
Monday I proved once more that idiots still abound. The good news is they seem quite happy to stick to the WoW general forums. Blizzard needs to stop nerfing and start buffing all classes. The fact that they don’t understand nerfing all classes to suck equally is not balance is still astounding.
On Tuesday I found the list of the Hot Developers of ‘07, with MMOs getting a healthy showing. For some it remains to be seen whether they will continue their trend of high quality games or not.
The Highlight of the Week, on Wednesday, was pulled from Kill Ten Rats a great blog and a great article on MMOs.
I went into Karazhan, the first raid instance in the World of Warcraft expansion on Thursday. Though it didn’t go great, there were some good things I picked up on.
Read more: Weekly
After Two Years
2007-03-19 06:23:07
You would think they could manage to keep the WoW forums online, well, all the time. I constantly get errors from the forums. The features that should be available to use are broken. Or, one of my favorites, I write a post that takes longer than the time-out period for my session and it logs me out, losing the post entirely. That’s just poor forum software.
I don’t check out the forums all the time, usually my realm forums about three times a week, and the general forums maybe once. When I do want to look at the forums though, it would be nice if, you know, it was possible to. I understand that in-game downtime would be much more of a hassle to people, and I don’t disagree, but making your web presence suck doesn’t exactly put customers in a good mood either. Of course, I don’t think Blizzard much cares about their customers anymore.
Is anyone else annoyed by how shockingly awful the WoW official forums are? I know they just upgraded, but I think t
Read more: Years
If Only
2007-03-20 07:59:59
I’m sure some of this is based in fact, but there are other parts that are obviously not. That being said, I kind of hope those Druid changes, at least a few, really happen because that would make some spells actually useful at new times. And I would love another 200% armor in Tree Form, then I may be three shotted instead of two. Of course, the fact that shadow Priests are getting buffed seems a bit odd. I mean…they are already melting faces, what more could you want really?
world of warcraft, patch notes, druid, priest, blizzard, patch 2.1
Repairing Gears #4: Information Management, Part 3
2007-03-22 04:03:15
This one will have to be a bit shorter and lacking a diagram since I was away from my home computer most of the day. The good news is, there is no great need for a diagram as it is more of an addition to last week’s topic than an entirely new one. As promised, this week will be a bit about buffs and debuffs. More specifically, how they are displayed, seeing as how that’s what we are talking about in this series of Repairing Gears
.
If you head on back to last week’s Repairing Gears
you’ll be able to get a good picture in your mind from the diagram for what I am about to add to it. Right on the player’s circle (or target’s circle, for that matter) would be attached smaller circles that have a color/graphic on them representing a certain debuff type. For instance, there may be a circle on a person when they have a poison on them. Mousing over that circle would display the information about the poison (damage/time remaining). If they also had a di
Read more: Management
This Ass Kicking Brought to You by Coca-Cola
2007-03-21 16:01:19
Just last week I was thinking about this, and now I see it happening. Sponsored Arena teams in World of Warcraft. Now, given I wasn’t thinking only of Arena teams, but I was thinking of how MMOs could fit into the whole “professional” gaming idea. Guild Wars would seem to have a good system to do this by. World of Warcraft’s new arena system also works (obviously.) What else can be done though? Will we be seeing entire guilds sponsored in both PvP and PvE areas in the future, getting paid to be the first to down a boss or the highest ranked in PvP?
It would certainly be interesting.
Via WoW Insider
sponsors, arena, professional gaming, pvp, world of warcraft
Read more: Kicking
Highlight of the Week
2007-03-22 14:51:06
This week’s highlight comes to us from the fine Blizzard Web Team, who managed to pump this out in all the time they spend not working on the forums.
It is still confusing as all hell, but the attunements in general are ridiculous to figure out so having this little bit of help is nice. It is far better than most of the player created ones because it is done using AJAX and allows for some nice abilities, like stopping and locking an attunement in place so I can figure out what the heck to do.
So, finally, Blizzard manages to do something with their website right. Bravo Blizzard!
blizzard, world of warcraft, raid attunements, highlight of the week
Read more: Highlight
Weekly Roundup 3/23/07
2007-03-24 00:37:40
What happened this week? Truthfully I don’t know.
Monday I wondered why Blizzard can’t get a decent forums up for their site after two years. Why are we still using a partially working crap pile even after the update? Blizzard’s need to re-invent the wheel instead of using the many available forum softwares in existence is just silly.
Speaking of Blizzard and stupidity, Tuesday I found some obviously fake patch notes. Why obviously fake? Because they actually spend time buffing and fixing the classes. Silly noobs, lrn2blizzard, just nerf the shit out of everything and see what happens.
On Wednesday there was an interesting topic about sponsored Arena teams in World of Warcraft. Will MMOGs be the next huge contenders for the professional gaming market? Later that day we hit up the Repairing Gears topic, its debut at it’s new daily slot. Sadly, no diagrams.
The Highlight of the Week was something Blizzard managed to do nicely. Well, more like in typical
Read more: Weekly
Glad this Group Sucked
2007-03-26 17:41:53
PlayOn, a blog about the social aspect of MMOs, which I read on occasion had an article put up in November (a good time it would seem for the subject) about why we should happily accept playing with morons…or something like that.
Not that I necessarily disagree with the fact that shared disgust for an idiot helps bring the good players together, but I’m not sure I follow the logic behind saying that bad players are a good thing, that they are necessary for the game. That’s like saying a person must be dehydrated before they can appreciate a cold glass of water.
I don’t have to work with horrible groups to know and appreciate a good group. The notion is silly. I’m sure there are people like that. They are the same people who didn’t listen to their parents when they said not to touch the pot on the stove because it was hot. They touched it, and they got burned and it hurt and then, finally, they learned their lesson. It would seem so much easi
Read more: Group
Spoiled
2007-03-28 19:41:41
MMO gamers are spoiled. Badly. If you read all of the things that people write about the genre and how it is stagnating, there’s no innovation you would probably never pick one up. That’s unfortunate because the genre is not slow to change.
Take a look at how long the MMORPG has been around (in it’s current form, you could argue MUD’s but they aren’t the same, thus the separate designation). I think it’s fair to say around 10 years, because it’s decently accurate and a nice even number to deal with. For 10 years the MMO games aren’t doing too bad. Look at platformers, they haven’t really changed since 1985, that’s over 20 years, for you folk who don’t like math. First person shooters haven’t changed, well, ever (to all you Halo/Gears of War people freaking out, the games are good, no doubt, but they hardly re-invent the genre.) And Final Fantasy is the same game-play every time, I love the games, but it is
Read more: Spoiled
Podcasting
2007-03-27 17:32:56
Well, not exactly podcasting, as that is far to grand a word for what I am going to do, but I am going to be putting up an audio file which will act as my post along with what I’m actually talking about in it (so you can skip ahead to what you want to hear, though obviously you’ll want to listen to all of it). I’m hoping to do the first one later this week or early next, depending on how long it takes me to work out the kinks with my experimentation up to this point.
podcasts, podcasting
Read more: Podcasting
Highlight of the Week
2007-03-30 03:41:58
Is it that time of the week already? Yes, yes it is.
This week’s highlight comes from recent commenter Cuppycake, and her blog (seriously where did all these females come from, everyone knows the interweb is for guys) Cuppytalk. Specifically, this post.
In this post we see a prime example of the reason the genre is classified as an extreme geek thing…even amongst other gamers. Folks who give stuff away to females (or those they think are females) make me sad. If you want to get rid of crap, just send it to me, not some random person you hope is a female. I guess what I’m really saying to all of you is…”Can I have your stuff?”
female gamer, cuppycake, cuppytalk, highlight of the week
Read more: Highlight
I See What You Did There
2007-03-29 15:58:13
Every time I try something new it seems to bite me in the ass. Two weeks ago I post that I’m going to be moving things around to avoid problems with delays of the Repairing Gears/Highlight of the Week/Weekly Roundup. Yesteray I get home and find that I can’t log into the site to finish off and post my Repairing Gears article. So yeah, it’s late. The even worse part? The images are saved on my home computer, so I won’t even be able to post it until I get back from work.
Mind you this time it wasn’t my fault. There were true technical difficulties that stopped me from even being able to get onto the site, not for lack of trying. But, the good news is there won’t be a delay of the Highlight of the Week, that will happen today also. You’ll just get a double dose of awesome as I put up the Repairing Gears as well (barring any other problems with the server.)
delay, Repairing Gears, highlight of the week, downtime
Warhammer Online Newsletter
2007-03-31 00:42:32
I was expecting this early in the day, but just got it now. Oh well. A couple of cool things, but nothing you probably don’t already have in your inbox. I’ll leave you with this picture from the newsletter, my personal favorite.
Read more: Warhammer
, Warhammer Online
WTF MAN DID YOUR GARDENER TEACH YOU HOW TO FERTILIZE?!
2007-04-02 15:40:30
All caps title, how cool am I?
Google alerts are perhaps one of the best things ever. For instance, they found me this article, which I would’ve have ever seen otherwise. The article comes from a guy who knows people who play World of Warcraft. Calling this guy a WoW player would shame the community, but he has, in fact, played the game, so in that most loose definition he is in fact a WoW player.
The point of this article seems to flip between “I don’t get why so many people like WoW” and “What’s wrong with power leveling?” but I’m just going to talk about the latter in this post, because he brings out a couple of interesting points.
He (Mike Musgrove) admits to using a power leveling service to skip those horrible levels 1-20 (because those are the annoying ones) so he could get to the more fun content. Mike gets a quote from the COO of a power leveling company in the article which is pretty interesting. I’ll quote it belo
Read more: TEACH
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