I briefly mentioned this during the Twisted Nether interview, but I think it deserves another saying: Cataclysm was not a horrible expansion and would have been a pretty awesome game by itself. The problem is Wrath of the Lich King. Or was.What did
Art is a strange thing. It's not quite a product, even if we often treat it as such. It's not so customizable. Don't like your toaster? Someone is making a similar one, but with that feature you want, and it doesn't spontaneously
Episode 132 – Logging OutNo, TNB is not going away but this week we are interviewing a WoW blogging that isn’t logging in to WoW anymore!? It’s Klepsakovic from Troll Racials are Overpowered!I guess they didn't want to put up the
It's the waiting. I hate the waiting. I don't mind the actual time required, but the waiting, that gets to me. How does a daily quest work? You do something and make progress toward a goal. Then you wait. I don't like that.In my ongoing
Saturday I was interviewed by Twisted Nether Blogcast.So there I was a few days before and I suddenly wondered if they knew I wasn't playing WoW anymore. I'd specifically not made a quitting post, and even called it such. It wouldn't
Supposedly EQ had some sort of corpse problem, in that you'd die and all your gear and everything would be laying there and you'd have to run naked to get it, but after too long wolves would eat it. This sounds like a terribly unfun system,
This Saturday, June 4th, Klepsacovic (that's me, btw) will be on the Twisted Nether blogpodwebcast thing. That's right, now you can hear my posts in the correct voice. As opposed to the current voice which I imagine is something between a
A new item drops and you win the roll or bid. It is now yours. Also, you are a developer with mad skills and right now, at this very second, you can rewrite the item enhancement system.Would you rather have one enchant that is hard to get or an enchant,
I had a bit of a Ghost Recon kick recently. Something about sneaking around with guns is very appealing. Valve apparently decided to take advantage of this and had a sale on Tom Clancy games, so I bought a bunch of Splinter Cell. Then Tesh tweeted
I previously suggested that Blizzard had a team of developers devoted solely to removing fun from the game. Then I briefly considered that maybe it was actually an overly ambitious balance team, devoted to rooting out imbalances, no matter how trivial.
Cataclysm was an expansion in name only. Whether we call the remade zones new content or not, they replace the old Azeroth, which means that they do not expand the world, merely change it (a lot). We did get a few entirely new zones for 80+, but in
Steam presents: Ubisoft week. Woo hoo, alright, let's get this thing going with the sales and the stuff. And here we are with the ad.33% off, that's pretty nice. Any exceptions?Oh right yes, we can see it right there.: game I've never
Does immersion require a rich, detailed story? No! In fact, the opposite may be much better.Does your average game of capture the flag in Warsong Gulch feel much like a war? Not to me. But why not? Surely we could see how two competing factions might
Tobold thinks MMOs are Communist. Well you know what? I agree. I think it's time we started treating MMOs like the free market that they should be.These days we've finally moved past the absurd notions of patience and so-called "experience".
Remember that Starcraft 2 game thingy that came out not recently? So I first played that recently. That's how I roll. Slow. If it helps, imagine that I pronounced roll more like roww, so then it rhymes with slow.My friends bought it slightly
A blogger I've never heard of, Silverspar (apparently just started), has gotten into a tiny little tussle with a podcaster I've never heard of, TotalBiscuit (podcasts are for the illiterate, true story). I can't say I have much of an opinion
The other day I was googling myself in a vain attempt at vanity and I found that an old guide I wrote about paladin blessings is still around. At the time it was fairly handy, or at least I thought so. With the help of the paladin forums I'd managed
You know what would be a great job? Try this: fresh air, talking to people, helping them out, getting good money by saving people money. No strings attached to anything. Perfect, right?Sure. Of course. Assuming you don't utterly fail at sales
I noticed that Civilization has, obviously, a fairly big and extensive WWII mod. I mean, what game doesn't? Did you know Cataclysm was originally going to revolve around Caverns of Time sending us to fight Hitler? Yep. All that got watered down
Do we want trivial content? I think not. Maybe sometimes. But it's not an evil elitist conspiracy that causes games to have difficulty parts. It's fun. I mean the difficult parts are fun, not to suggest that evil elitist conspiracies are
Responding to years of complaints from paying subscribers, Blizzard has finally taken action. Patch 4.3 is being internally, and thanks to my big mouth, externally, labeled as the "realism" patch.The circulating memo about the patch, which
But how much?For $15 a month you have access to all content in WoW. With a catch. There are barriers. These take three general forms: time, skill, and organization.TimeTime barriers mean needing more time for content than you have. These can take
Why do we have quests?StoryQuests tell stories. They can do this well, or poorly. Most do it poorly. So we skip some text and load addons to tell us where to go. Having those, we can skip even more text. Next thing we're missing the truly good
Why do we assume that we want to, and must be able to, play with friends? That's just asking for trouble. I think it's an unreasonable expectation. I don't do everything with all of my friends. Why should WoW, or any other game, be
It's pretty clear that one of the reasons for badges slowly giving the top tier of loot* is to encourage raiders to go back to heroics. The fear is that without them there won't be enough people to fill groups and queue times will be even worse.
Thank you, Google Reader for saving this post. No thanks to Google Blogger from destroying it.For ease of writing, assume that "skill" refers to some mix of time and skill.That triangle is a rough representation of a theoretical population.
It was the one with the ugly triangle about population and raid difficulty. If anyone happens to have it laying around somewhere, maybe in a reader, please send me a copy. Or copy-paste a gigantic comment. Speaking of which, if you somehow have the
I'm not suggesting that non-raiders are dirty hobos, but maybe they should want to be.Don't forget to go to the actual site and check the red button! It's the button bonus.
Yesterday I advocated returning to something closer to linear progression for raiding and heroics: raid X, then raid Y, then raid Z. The goal, and hopefully the effect of it, is to separate players out by skill and experience, so that if we are in a
I can see the marketing now: "A world rich with interaction between new players and veterans sharing their knowledge!" This sounds great, of course. Up to a point.Have you ever noticed how high school physics classes rarely take place at Fermilab?