What is most dominant in our servers are gdkp runs, runs that people buy their gear with gold and the pot gets split to the 25 who does the raid. Since when did the game turn to simulate the real world where money is everything. The thing we feel about wow is similar to that of BBB. Burning Crusade was the prime time of raiding. People couldnt’ buy gear, people compared stats of items properly and not by gs, people used tactics and not outgear everything, people actually used things called cc in instances. People used trade chat for trading and people could improvise.

Lately our server has been filled with those who spam trade just for attention of their reserved item’d pug raids. Its really really frustrating to see trade constantly flowing, not moving, FLOWING. NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING can be read. Another thing that is screwed up about WOTLK is the 10/25 of every raid. Content is just not meant to be repeated twice a week. Whatever happened to a storyline? What ever happened to logic. Imagine Saurffang going “10 people can kill me easily, but i just love wiping those 25′s” Make any sense?

Badge gear. Gear from heroics emblems outranks naxxramas. I clap for blizzard. Icc5 gear that outgears naxx25-eoe25 gear or even ulduar 10 gear. Really blizz, good job. You’ve just created more asshats in the world of warcraft so you could make more money. I think its time people who care about skill revert back to playing something more sensible. Sorry about my rambling, but blizz really doesnt make sense anymore. This isnt even considering dungeon tp or boa’s.

Yes, BoA’s. Ever wondered why people cant play their classes anymore? Ever wonder how people dont even know how to use their skills? Remember the time of NO BoA’s? Remember the time people had to strain their asses to level? Well blizz had a purpose for this, TO SLOWLY LEARN HOW TO PLAY OUR CLASS.

I say revert to the time of Burning Crusade, revert to the time of cc, revert to the time we were playing wow, not working it.

Course, I’ve said that before.

Second, the delay is in finding tanks. I have yet to find a higher proportion of raiding tanks in heroic pugs than the DPS and healers. In fact, the opposite is true. I rarely if ever see a raid geared tank in a pug, but I always have at least one, most often two, raiding geared DPS. What I do see are tanks that are undergeared and are pushed by DPS to “gogogogo”, or who blow through faster than they are capable and get carried by healers, and learn nothing about how to do their heroic with skill to get past a difficult spot.

You can disagree with me, certainly. But your point, which seems to be that we can’t run heroics without bribing raiders to come carry us, or to increase the pool of players available so there are enough people to run with, doesn’t seem valid to me. Ask any tank in a heroic, the queue time is directly related to tank shortages, not to a lack of DPS or healers. IN fact, I’d be inclined to suspect that if you remove the raiders, the queue times would decrease as leveling DPS go tank to get faster queue times, while the DPS raiders that won’t lower themselves to tank JUST for their one run of two Frost vanish from the queue.

Spin. It’s a wonderful thing.

The badge system may not be perfect, but it is a better system than Vanilla and BC to encourage more gameplay and see more content. I look forward to see what tweaks Blizzard has in Cata.

Semper Fi, BBB.

Hoorah, Devil Dog.

Caring enough to do that much legwork is admirable and its not like that forever. A thick skin is definitely needed to begin with but after a while those people who whisper you will increase in volume till all you have to do is work out what remaining spots you have to plug and set the time. Then its just keeping it running on an even keel and enforcing the rules. I’ve found that Pugs where there’s someone dedicated enough to make it run smoothly and fairly are a limited resource and that the ideal players you want will be more willing to agree to attend a regular one that risk it in a random pug. I’m pretty lucky in that I can generally call on 10-12 spots direct from the alts/friends in my guild and have enough regular attenders who know the time and pop along every week.

Keep it up and you’ll really enjoy it. Its one of the things that kept the game interesting for me.

PS. (I don’t use GS either – /w will get you a better player 9/10 times)
.-= Echo´s last blog ..Passing Loot =-.

Y’see, they already tried the whole ‘must master previous content to see current content’ thing. It was called VANILLA and BC. I don’t know about anyone else, but I never got a chance to step beyond a few feet from the entrance portal to MC, let alone see anything else before the dark portal opened to Outland. Back when they did the original Naxx event, I even found myself thinking sarcastically, “Oh good, more previews of places I will never see… why am I bothering again?” Many alts were rolled as I tried to find something to do. Outland was a little better with the introductory raid being a 10-man, but once the group I was with wanted to run bigger things I was shut out. Pugging Kara was doable, but TK and Coilfang? Didn’t happen. By the end of BC I was rerolling more alts and eventually taking a 2-month break from the game for lack of interest in even logging on.

Enter WotLK. I level up some more characters, not really planning on doing anything, just seeing the story unfold this time. Last summer I’m just poking around on my moonkin (who just hit 80 a couple weeks prior) when the guild wants me to come along to fill in for Ulduar and eventually ToC. Honestly, Asegi was the last character I expected to raid with. And seriously, after a few times downing bosses the thrill disappears, the rotation is ingrained, the fire is predictable, and I’m looking for new challenges. But this time I start to have options. With the emblem system itself levelling up to match, if not current content than just prior, my alts can catch up, even start pugging the current content if I need a change of pace. DPS isn’t my preference, tanking is.

Quite simply, what the current systems give me is that greatest treasure of all, which is HOPE (apologies to Terry Pratchett). Hope that I’m not stuck looking at the same tired places with the same characters, banging my head against a wall to get ‘that one drop’ that will let them into higher tiers of content. Hope that if someone I know and like in-game needs something, I can provide help and not have to say ‘sorry, my tank/healer is only at heroic level and always will be’. Hope that what I’m doing now isn’t what I must be doing for the rest of eternity, in order to see everything, or do everything I want.

And to echo Vulpina… without the frost emblems as a bonus, there’s no incentive for raiders to run heroic content, drastically cutting down on the pool available for random heroics. My warrior has no need for triumphs anymore, even without being a raider… why would he put himself into the filthy pug pool at all at this point? One less tank, and your dps (and healer) queues just got longer.

I’m not going to include heroics… because none of the bosses are tuned for 232+ gear as the ice boss is. It is hard for me to even consider VoA as having any more then one boss these days because there is only one boss that is designed for my warrior’s quality of gear.

What they should have done is literally separated the bosses in VoA into their own instance. That way people can go for the bosses they want. I have no interest or desire to ever fight archavon just like I don’t have any desire to run heroics on my warrior anymore. Weekly raids need to go away too because that is just a bad idea. It won’t get people raiding older instances past the first boss. Progression should be progression and mixing that with old content is a bad idea. I’m all for heroics dropping triumph… that helps alts and new people gear up… but dropping frost means that is one more thing for the frustrated raiders to do. Not letting raiders graduate from old content breeds frustration.
.-= Whats my main again?´s last blog ..Its been quite the journey =-.

To prove that a 25 man raid could be pugged in a positive manner to some guildies, I actually lead a PuG 25 ICC a couple of weeks ago. It was a mixed success. I spent over an hour and a half getting the group together. I advertised in trade (feeling pieces of my soul decaying with every /2) that it was just the first wing and that gearscore and achievement were nice and all, but not necessary. I was literally interviewing each person through whispers before inviting them or declining them. Not about gearscore, but I did make sure they were appropriately geared. I didn’t require achievements, but made sure they understood the fights and their roles on each fight. I let them know that it would be an “appropriately geared” group and that it would take a long time to put it together and a long time to complete and that we would probably wipe several times. I covered asshattery, loot rules, afk rules, dps and healing meter rules, vent rules and a ton more stuff before invites. I bet I talked to 50 people or more. It was a HUGE pain in the ass. We failed on Saurfang twice and tension got the better of a few people. I muted their ass in vent and just watched their little green megaphone keep lighting up. But the instant that it got tense, I was basically done. The fun was gone. Of course, it was only 2 people trying to help, but they got angry and it was contagious. A couple more tries and I called it. The worst part is that every time I log in now, I get a whisper or two from some really nice people asking me to do it again because they can’t get into a pug, even though they are competent and capable. Yeah, I got to feel good about myself and my little samaritan attempt to get people into ICC, but it really wasn’t worth it overall, not for me and probably not for a most of the people that were in the raid. I may do it again, but only when I have a lot of time to play, and I plan it ahead with the guild first. It’s less stress and hassle to just deal with the inevitable idiots and asshats by just pugging it with my wife.

“That they want something from lower level content to gear at the highest levels, and they act as though they are somehow lowering themselves, slumming, in order to get it.”

This is the problem, definitely. I don’t know how to fix it, but encouraging people running top-end content to run the lowest level content is just bad.