I have attained another level in my ‘adult’ base class by becoming a strong adopter of hot morning beverages.
In other words, I now drink coffee more than anything else, all morning long. Just like my parents, and my grandparents, and so forth.
Now, my beverage of choice is coffee, but I’m not going to be elitist about this. While I myself haven’t gone for one of the prestige classes built around Latte or Chai Tea, and I haven’t taken the disadvantage “Expensive Name Brand Vendor Only” in order to qualify for a higher social standing prestige class, I can appreciate what a delightfully diverse culture the hot morning beverage crowd has become.
Still. For me, it’s all about the coffee.
Coffee like you get in the generic can, with the color dot that says “not too strong, not too light, straight down the middle like a wuss afraid to fight”.
I’m interested in branching out, I keep an open mind. I’m not prejudiced, I like experimenting with the occasional Celestial Seasonings blend, a Mocha or a Latte, just for a taste of something different.
Seasonal coffees like Pumpkin Spice on a cold winter morning, mmmmm, yummy.
I found the Cinnamon-flavored coffee was amazing. It won my heart, yes it did.
I went back to get cases to stock up, only to find it gone without a trace. No location code, no shelf space, and the store has never carried it again.
It has become the Coffee That Must Not Be Named. Truly, it’s flavor was good, but now that I cannot have it, it has become that most exquisite of tastes, exotic and mysterious, never to be equalled.
I think, in fact, that the reason it was pulled was because it was too seductive.
It posed a threat to our modern American way of life. Homeland Security labeled cinnamon coffee a terrorist threat, and took it away, never to be seen again. If you listen close, you can hear the rubber hoses beat the beans and smell the grounds burn under the glare of the high-intensity lights.
Coffee that good? Too dangerous for mere mortals to comprehend or consume without terrifying effects.
I don’t like to think on the horrors that poor coffee may be suffering in a cell in Gitmo.
Instead, I like to think that the cinnamon coffee I sampled and now desire above all other blends was destined for the hallowed halls of Asgard, and it was a simple UPS sorting error that sent it to lowly Aldi’s Store #78545 instead.
A terrible fate may have been averted in the nick of time. Who could say what wonders or terrors my typing fingers may have bashed out under it’s divine influence?
The world will never know. The world was not MEANT to know!
Whew! Crisis averted.
Wait.
Oh, right. Coffee.
I be drinking coffee, and by coffee I mean a hot brew. I do not drink chilled coffee. To me, chilled coffee is what happens when you’re writing a long blog post, bring the cup up to take a sip, and make a face. Blech! Cold coffee. Shudder.
Nothing for it then but to prove geek cred by applying microwave radiation directly on tepid liquid, infusing pure, raw power into my beverage, power born of SCIENCE!
This post is not meant to be a passionate statement about coffee. That’s a bonus.
No, this is meant to be a message for all those like me who delight in the drinking of a nice, hot drink now and then.
While my hero Jack Reacher has his own thoughts on the perfect vessel to drink coffee from, what I like is a heavy ceramic mug, thick walled and oversized.
When we visited Walt Disney World, I saw the perfect mug, and carefully carted it back intact to our home on the other side of the country.
I have now been testing this mug. I’m not gonna endorse a mug until I’ve put it through it’s paces.
Well, I’m here to tell you, this mug is the cats meow.
Now, I understand your concern when you see the words “oversized”.
Yeah right, heard that one before. What, it can hold a whole extra teaspoon? I need the ounces to be weighty, I have typing to do!
Allow me to reassure you. It is, indeed, oversized.
Here is my mug next to my other beverage of choice for the purposes of comparison.
There. That sucker will EAT the mountain dew can. Step off, dew, You’ve been warned.
So there you have it, my friends. When you’ve got a payload as powerful as coffee, shouldn’t you have a delivery system that shows the world you are SERIOUS about what you do?
Bearwall! Ah, the smell of fresh bear droppings on a nice clean blog page.
It smells like… oh, damn.
Smelly bear, smelly bear, what have they been feeding you?
Beer and bacon and BBQ beans, that’s what a big butted bear is made of.
Surprise, surprise, I have been playing a little Diablo 3 this week.
I don’t know that my experiences are going to be all that interesting, but my approach to the game has been to ignore it and all related discussions completely until release.
I wouldn’t say I’ve taken pleasure in ignoring the latest details MMO Champion would release during Beta, or in passing by the fevered, frenzied arguments about it’s features that popped up like shrooms all over the blogosphere.
Well, yeah, I guess I would.
I was playing World of Warcraft, and while it’s nice to see what is intended in a beta for a game I’m actively playing, like WoW, I really couldn’t get into following all the details of a game that was unplayable.
Basically, I ask this of a company – if you’re creating a game, give me a video pimping your art design and music to entice my imagination, then give me some gameplay videos showing me what it’s like to actually get embedded into it. That’s it, I’ll take it from there. The more detail you tell me, the less left to my imagination. Give me a good view of the gameplay, I’ll see all I need for a snap judgment.
I played Diablo, Diablo II, and the expansions. I’ve got fond memories of them all, but the gameplay… they are, at their hearts, button mashing hack and slash dungeon crawlers, and there was nothing wrong with that at all. But the tastiest bits of those dungeon crawlers was exploring the world, the lore, and the specifics of the gameplay as it unfolded through the levels, so why would I want to spoil the mysterious bits with spoilers before I even crack the can?
Plus… one of the things I loved about my previous Diablo experiences was how rock-solid polished they were. Shit worked, no bugs. Why spoil by trying them when they’re all buggy?
I wanted to walk into the new game just like I did the old ones, to get immersed in a POLISHED game experience and enjoy my ignorance.
The best reason I could think of to follow the development would be to see if I felt enticed enough to buy it for $60, so as soon as they announced you got the game for free with an Annual Pass in WoW, well, I stopped following the news. Purchase was a done deal, I’ll play it when I get it, and see what it’s like then.
Fast forward to launch week, my friends. Ooh, new game, cool, time to see what all the hype was about. I hope it doesn’t suck!
I’ve been so successful at remaining spoiler free (that sounds better than ignorant, doesn’t it?) that I had to no shit look up how many classes there were and watch the “What the heck does this class do” videos on MMO Champion just to get some idea of which one I might try first.
I didn’t have even the most basic awareness of what was going to happen when I fired it up. Except, like, you know.
Demons and shit.
I watched the Barbarian video, the Demon Hunter and the Monk. I didn’t watch the Witch Doctor because the gameplay description was all “lol pets lol”, and I didn’t watch the Wizard because, well, squishy was my first impression, and squishy is for after you play around with it.
A heavy plate wearing class, a damage sponge, that is just the thing for a training wheels experience.
I didn’t think I’d start with a Barbarian though, because, well, it looked identical to a WoW Warrior, been there done that, I deal with rage issues enough as it is. If I want to deal with rage, I can just catch up on Twitter, plenty of rage to be found there.
I didn’t think I wanted to start with a Demon Hunter because, and this is the only real reason, I didn’t fancy micro-managing traps. Demon Hunter went on my mental “try when I’m bored with my first character, twin crossbows look sweet” list.
So I watched the Monk video, and I thought it looked pretty cool. It is about damn time someone decided that what the world lacked was Hungarian Ninjas, and I for one welcome our new Hungarian Ninja lightning-fisted overlords.
Awesome voice acting on the accents. I started off with a male one, booted through the startup intro and then thought, “Holy crap, this guy is so awesome, what does a female Hungarian Ninja sound like, OMIGOD RUN GO SEE GO SEEEEE”
I do not regret my decision. Sunshatter the female Hungarian Ninja is a lot of fun.
In getting started, the Monk certainly felt powerful, I kicked some skeleton ass. It was pretty cool. Nice effects, a melee class with lots of “get to the bad guy fast” abilities, very nice.
The more things change, though, the more they feel the same.
The first thing that really got into my head like Deja-Diablo-Vue was how like Diablo II the gear situation felt.
One of the things I carried forward from Diablo II was my irritation with their loot system.
Drops were always random, and it was difficult to know what stats you wanted, and if you did know exactly what was optimal, good luck ever finding it.
I only ever played Diablo II single player, and I remember feeling really irritated that they couldn’t have drops that were a little more… focused towards being useful, but in different ways.
I’m a warrior, what do I need Intellect on my plate helm for? Why does my two handed flamberge give me +Arcane Power? WTF?
At the time, I figured it was so that, when playing Diablo II in a group for years, the drop of an actually USEFUL piece of gear would be cause for celebration, acrimonious arguments, and furious dissention. All the stuff that helps bond a group.
So, yeah, when I saw the return of some of the silly stat combinations, it brought me right back.
The reality of Diablo III is better, much better, the new game does not bear any real resemblance to how bad Diablo II gear drop stats were, but the feel is there on each wtf drop.
See, the reason it’s all good is, all that crap gear has a point! You can destroy it for component parts without regret. Plus, and this is amazing, as far as I can see there is NO soulbinding, so you can equip a drop, use it as long as you’d like, and then trade it to someone else.
Oh yeah, did I mention my shock at that change before? There is an Auction House, and you don’t have to decide between equipping an awesome item to level with or selling it. You can do both!
Level with that awesome item, then when you get an upgrade, turn around and break it up into forging mats, or sell it on the AH to someone else. Or stick it in your shared stash for an alt to use someday.
That… that is pretty amazing to me. It seems almost TOO useful, too considerate to players, to be a Blizzard game design decision.
Then again, the Black Market Auction House is coming soon, as well as account-wide shared mounts, and those are a bit of a shocker too. I thought Blizzard wanted us to run things a bazillion times hoping for that rare drop, and then suffer the anguish of the “soulbound on the wrong character that ran it once to help a friend” tragedy.
Your tears nourish the black soul of Blizzard developers, who, or so I’ve heard, are all retired Special Forces E&E Trainer cadre who miss torturing willing participants in a myriad of perfectly legal ways.
My amazement of the transferrable loot system was overshadowed by my annoyance at how confused I feel at Blizzard’s itemization.
Understand, I could answer all of these questions with a 30 second web search. That’s not the point. The point is to have the joy of discovery all on my own, and that joy has to be balanced by my inevitable irritation when I’m ignorant, and can’t figure out a solution quickly.
As much else that I love, I continue to feel confused with armor and weapons.
For example… are there actual armor types?
I look at an item description, and it seems sometimes it says an item is cloth, other times leather, but many other times there is no actual ‘armor class’ or type listed, just an armor value.
Stats are fairly obvious in association, but can my Wizard wear the same types of armor as my Barbarian? There are class-specific items with a class name in some pieces, but in others, it seems pretty shaky.
It’s not quite as obvious as the system that I, as a WoW player, am used to. Such as “You are a Mage, you wear Cloth. Suck it up, silk-boy.” Or “You are a Druid, you can wear Cloth or Leather armor, you have a level 60 Skill that says if you wear all Leather you get stat bonuses so you are intended to wear leather whenever possible, if you don’t like it go stick a feather in your butt and pop flight form, bird-brain.”
Not a big issue, just… ah, the feel of Diablo II in the air. Refreshing!
When I’d played my Monk for a while, I decided I wanted to try a ranged class. I was having fun, but I was curious if a Wizard would feel noticeably squishier, and if so, would that be more challenging? The Monk was feeling a bit too easy mode.
I created a Wizard. A male Wizard. I refrained from making the obvious emo jokes when I saw his default pose, I just named him Unbearable, and really, when you look at his pose, why wouldn’t you? I look at him and I know *I* want to smack that smug know-it-all smirk off his face.
Here is the funny thing.
Because my monk was a melee combatant, I worked hard to get weapon upgrades. More powerful paired Vampiric daggers means more stabby-stab damage, right? Sorta?
But the Wizard is a spell-casting inferno of magical destruction. I am throwing lightning bolts and orbs of arcane might at the bad guys, all doing with the blowing up thing.
What does the DPS of a sword have to do with the damage my fireball does?
Well, it doesn’t, or so I reason out, and off I went through most of the first act ignoring my weapon unless a Wand dropped, since Wands might affect my Magic Missile.
I was having a pretty hard time towards the end, fighting the waves of bad guys in the Cathedral leading up to the Skeleton King. I was getting swamped, and as good as Arcane Orb is, it was taking every bit of skillful use of Frost Nova and that Arcane Explosion thingie AoE and running and gunning to stay alive.
Then, I decided to toss a 14.5 DPS flaming spear into my weapon slot. Just cause, you know. Flaming javelin mages are so the thing, right?
Oh hey, suddenly my Magic Missile is doing HOLY SHIT I BLEW UP THE WHOLE ROOM WITH MY ARCANE ORB OMGWTFBBQFORREALS.
It turns out, and this was a hell of a surprise, it turns out that the higher the DPS rating on my melee weapon, the more powerful my magical spells are.
So… my weapon is a stat stick that has no intuitive link with my magical power, but does anyway. Fair enough, lesson learned, time to toast some Horny Tauren… err, goatmens.
It’s been lots of fun, dungeon crawling has never been more interesting. Learning to hold down the shift button whenever I want to blow stuff up at range (it keeps me from moving when I click), learning that I can click on my Templar companion’s portrait and train his skills and GIVE HIM gear to make him more powerful, there are all sorts of fun little discoveries so far.
And I’ll be honest with you, the fact that I am trying, screwing it up, getting myself in stupid situations and then discovering my error later? That is actually a large part of the fun.
There is something inherently perverse in how I’m playing the game. The moments that stand out for me as the best are the ones where I go “Oh shit! THAT’S what I was supposed to do! Well, duh.”
And yet… it’s been good.
I’ve been thinking, I’m having so much fun and being delighted by wonder and getting surprised by my mistakes and working through them, that I’m thinking I ought to try working ignorance into the rest of my day to day activities.
I’m thinking, from now on, when I’m driving I might want to stop turning my head around to see what is behind me and to the sides before I make a lane change. I think going to that extra effort to actually SEE the blind spots and make sure they’re clear before I change lanes is keeping me from having a certain taste of mystery, of wonder in my life. I think I should cut back on being informed, no turn signals either (why should I prevent other drivers from enjoying their own moment of enjoyable surprise learning experiences) and just glance in the side mirror and pop over in the same movement.
What could possibly go wrong with this plan?
Don’t worry though, I know I’m not the first one to think of this as a way to add a certain flair and excitement to my day. Hell, from what I can see on the road, I’m apparently the last one to realize how fun it must be.
Here’s hoping that you and yours are having a great time in whatever game you may be playing, and I’ll leave you with this tagline:
“Ignorance – It’s not just a playstyle choice, it’s a LIFESTYLE choice.”
Cassie and I drove down from the Twin Cities to Winona, Minnesota this weekend to see Collin Raye perform at Winona State University for a Mothers Day treat. Collin Raye is one of Cassie’s favorite musicians, and I admit I’m very fond of him as well.
Collin Raye has this one particular song that Cassie knows is probably my favorite song ever, a song that speaks to me of everything in my entire life, and how I feel about it. Probably a “I’m old” thing, but every time I hear Collin Raye sing the song, I get one of those flashback montage things in my head.
Well, Collin kinda hinted that the next song he was going to sing was going to be this song, so Cassie had enough advance warning to get the camera out and set it to record video.
The beginning is totally shaky-cam, but since Cassie was all twisted up trying to record from our third row seats without having the 1000 gigawatt light from the LCD screen on the camera blind everyone behind us, I think she did fantastic.
Honestly, this is probably my favorite song. It’s not one that goes on the gym workout track, or the “I want to drive 120 mph and feel like a Formula One driver” CD, but it’s the song that always makes me stop whatever I’m doing at the time to turn it up and listen.
I think it says it all that, during what is supposed to be Cassie’s special night to relax and enjoy the music she loves, she still thought of me to record this song. What it says is, I don’t do enough for Cassie.
I hope you enjoy it in the spirit it’s offered. And if you do, I encourage you to take the time to visit Amazon and consider buying one of his CDs. The new gospel one is, IMO, fantastic. Undefeated is great too.
I’ll admit, when I first saw MMO Champion tweet about a stunning MoP Cross-Realm Zones revelation, my only response was, “What the hell is that? No, really, what? Why? And again, what?”
I could copy/paste the official text from Blizzard, but I think I can safely bottom-line this.
Leveling zones are empty. Capital cities are full. This is a problem.
If we combine servers, leveling zones would have more players and feel more populated, but the capitols would be crushed in bored max level characters, and you would never find a mailbox again.
So, we will leave capital cities and high-population areas alone on separate servers, but combine the populations in the leveling zones.
Before I even get into my opinion on this or talk about it, I want to address that statement.
There is one HUGE assumption in that statement. The assumption is, a crowded level-up zone provides a ‘more fun play experience’ than a low population one.
Did anyone ask you if you liked having the mobs and quest drops in a zone all to yourself? Did I miss a poll? The zones aren’t empty even now, they’re just lightly populated. Their new cross-realm zones won’t add people that weren’t there before, it’s just going to take the people that were already there, and pile them in tighter.
Maybe Blizzard is correct in saying that it will be more fun, but that was a statement of fact. They will do this, and it will make the game more fun. Period. End of discussion, because a flat statement like that doesn’t leave any room for discussion, there was a fact, and they are acting on it. If you disagree, then you are opposed to more fun for other people, you meanie, you.
Moving on from semantics, I’d like to talk about this concept like an adult for a few minutes.
I know it’s a stretch, work with me here.
What Blizzard has been coding and testing is a fact. They already had the idea, discussed it, committed resources to it, and have apparently gotten to the implementation stage for the big reveal.
But what made them think of it in the first place?
What I’m wondering is, what was the original intent. What benefits were intended to be gained, and who is going to reap them?
The normal image of a dev workshop is of a group of people tossing out ideas on improvements to the game. The goal of such an imaged gathering is to focus on new ideas that would please the existing customer, and retain them.
This could have come out of such a gathering, but there is another possibility that occurs to me.
They could have been having a meeting to discuss what they could do to try and retain the new players on a free trial account.
Any benefit to long term players who are already at max level would be incidental. We’ve already been through the zones, we’ve reached max level, we are at end game. We likely are in guilds, have friends, can get Heirlooms, and don’t need to group to complete quests in zones that had group quests and encounters nerfed.
It’s a subtle distinction, but this feels like a move intended to address the question, “How do we try and MAKE the world feel vital and alive to new players, when the existing players are all in capital cities?”
I’m going to take a moment to use a real world example to explain why I think this, and why I think it’s a very smart move.
Do you ever watch cooking shows? The ones where Gordon Ramsey goes to some failing restaraunt to tell them why they’re bollix? Or nightclub scenes?
One of the pieces of advice I’ve found fascinating, since I can test it myself when out and about, is to confine the space for the number of guests you’ve got, through things like moveable wall sections or dividers.
By keeping the space cramped, by pushing people close together but not too close, you build an artificial feeling of intimacy, of vitality.
Instead of large, echoing empty spaces that leave the area feeling like a lifeless void sucking all the music out of the room, you cram ‘em all together, bumping into each other and chatting and hearing other people having a good time, noise and movement and energy, vitality.
People enter that kind of environment and feel that they’ve made a good choice; just look at all these other people that are having a great time, I made a wise decision to come here and have a good time too.
The idea is, you can have tons of space, but don’t open it up until the place is really jammed to capacity. People getting crunched in is better for overall business than a few people upset that they feel overcrowded.
That’s why I think that this came mainly from think-tank discussions on how to entice and retain new players, not from a discussion on how to improve the game for the existing playerbase as a whole.
I’m fine with it, I think it’s a good idea. I get that they have long had technology that increases spawn rates based on use… lots of people mining nodes increases spawn rates, that sort of thing. I’m not worried that, after fine tuning, we’re going to have a worse time trying to complete quests competing for drops. I LIKE having people in zones to bump into.
I think it’s a very nice improvement, and I love that the way it’s being implemented, when added to Real ID, means you can have friends leveling alts together and questing together even when they are on two different servers. That freaking rocks.
My point to bring this up, is simply to point out that aside from what is developed and goes live is the question, “Why might they have come up and invested time and money in this?”
That is always a good question to ask. It reveals what a game developer feels is an issue important enough to spend some real money to address.
You can say all sorts of things, but I like the glimpse I think this gives us of what they are worried about…. and what kind of action they’re going to take.
I won’t say I love it just yet, until I get a chance to try it live, but I’m one of those that likes to feel as if I’m part of a living, breathing, vital game world full of people having fun.
With most everyone playing max level characters, server population being what it is means that yes, there are tons of people playing alts… but they are the minority on any given server. By bringing them all together, why, I get to play with others instead of being all alone.
I bet the PvP servers are going to have a blast.
The best thing, the very best thing to me is maybe this will stop Blizzard from their repeated attempts to FORCE max level characters to spend time in low level zones to give a false sense of vitality in areas low level character inhabit.
The games played with removing portals, adding portals, moving portals around, forcing us to go through the Dark Portal to get to Shatt, to take the boat to get to Northrend, to keep us flying and riding around, to design professions that force us to fly all over the world back and forth through leveling zones for dig sites…
Please, stop trying to shoehorn forced zone populations. Let it stop.
Connect the servers up like this, let all the people actually interested in playing in a zone together BE in a zone together, and the World… will be a happy place.
*bonus game… how many assumptions did I make in my analysis? See how many you can count!
There was another great, thought-provoking post by Rohan at Blessing of Kings today, this time discussing the consequences of large group and small group raiding to MMOs, player retention and MMO health.
I love Rohans posts, he always brings up great topics, adds his opinions or experiences, but then leaves it open for people to think about it or discuss without feeling that by dissenting they’re being confrontational. A happy place to have a conversation instead of an argument.
Silly, silly paladin, didn’t anyone ever tell him the internet is for drama?
When Rohan spoke about larger raid teams being more comfortable for some people to find a home, it spurred all kinds of sparks in my skull.
I’ll be honest with you… I probably don’t have any points to make. I just can’t resist taking a stroll down memory lane, which at my age is more like a 5 lane superhighway straight to the past, where I’ve built a summer cottage the size of the Magic Kingdom, there to spend my days.
I’ll pretend I have a point by contrasting my raiding experiences now compared to what I remember of the old, old, OLD days.
For about the last month, I’ve been raiding twice a week with two different 10-person groups.
On Saturdays I am part of a regular 10 person raid team, and on Thursdays I take part, when I can, in the guilds “Alt Night” Dragon Soul runs on a different character. Lately it’s been my Hunter.
Everyone here by now also knows that I’ve had plenty of opportunity to see the shining lights of awesome to be found in 25 person Looking For Raid.
About that, I’d like to be clear about how I feel concerning Looking For Raid. I bitch about individual players and how there always seems to be that 8% asshat quota that has no trouble getting filled for everysingle run. I’ll admit it.
Overall though, I remain delighted that Looking For Raid exists, and I still run it on someone every week, without exception. Sometimes on two different characters for different experiences, like Healing and ranged DPS. Still haven’t gotten tired of it, but give me five more months of this same stuff and I’ll be singing a different tune. Or caterwauling, as the case may be.
If dealing with asshats and adding them to /ignore is the price I pay for the fun I’ve had in LFR, then so be it. Give me more room in my Ignore List, and get out of my way, there are internet ultimate shadowy dragons to kill, and swaggering to do in the Eye of Eternity.
I’m pretty current on my World of Warcraft raiding. I’ve even done some Hard Modes on my Druid, up through the first four. Ooh, shiny pretty raiding.
But what about the past?
Casting my mind back over the years, I remember with fondness raiding in 40-person teams with Divine Might.
That line right there tells you this is bullshit. If I’ve somehow convinced myself that 40 person raiding was awesome, I must be delusional.
But really!
Divine Might was an absolute KICK ASS guild on Kael’thas when I first started playing the game, back in the days when the only end game raiding there was to look forward to was 40 person groups.
They had two raid teams, and at the time the progression flow in the game went as follows;
Get to level 60.
Run 5 person instances to get geared enough for the 10 person raids.
Run Blackrock Depths 5 billion times to get various people through the Ony attunement that can’t ever figure out what freaking part of the chain they’re on. Ever.
Start obsessing over Fire Resist gear.
Run 10 person raids in Upper and Lower Blackrock Spire to get geared.
Run 10 person raids in Zul’Gurub and lesser AQ to get geared. Work on Zandalari rep.
Finally join 40 person raid teams, start running Onyxia, never get your Tier. Ever. EVER.
Run Molten Core.
Run Molten Core.
Run Molten Core.
YES we still need Fire Resist gear, FFS!
Run Molten Core.
Run Onyxia. Who still needs their crafted Cloak for BWL?
Run Molten Core.
Run Onyxia.
Run Molten Core.
Run Onyxia.Are we done with the damn cloaks yet? OMIGOD.
Blackwing and AQ, here we go!
Naxx? OMIGOD the attunement go go go!
Oops, too late, expansion is here, 10 man and 25 man raiding is born, bah bye 40′s, time for the guild to eat itself over raid spots.
Ooh, that sounds fun, right?
Amazingly enough, it was. It really was.
Times do change, and we grow and adapt to the game. What was fulfilling before may seem simple and even boring now, but back then, there was a spark, an excitement to follow those quests and get attuned and earn a key and get a Drakefire Amulet forged, and everything else associated with it.
Rohan is in my opinion dead right on larger raiding groups back then having room for more people of all skill levels.
In 40 person raiding, there was absolutely some wiggle room to accomodate people who were not completely obsessed with maxing every last aspect of their raiding toolkit.
I’m not saying “room for idiots”, because it wasn’t that, although a truly great raid team could certainly absorb a few people who didn’t try… or know what to do.
No, I mean people who didn’t live, eat and breathe maximizing every little aspect of their game life.
See, I recall the fight mechanics back then as being a bit more… well, unforgiving than they are these days.
Perhaps this is rose-colored welding goggles in gear, but things back then seemed tuned loose for things like pure DPS or health or healing throughput, and tuned tight for movement, situational awareness, and restraint.
For a given value of ‘Don’t move when Flame Wreath is up or you’ll wipe the damn raid”, anyway.
The key seemed to be that as long as everyone stayed alive, you would win. But in order to stay alive, every single player had to manage their location and movement and switch targeting properly, or they’d pretty much die, and maybe suck a horde of adds in on the group on top of it.
Then you’d cheer from the floor for the rest of the run, short thought it may be.
Let’s just take Onyxia as an example.
Three phases to the battle, each a long phase.
To defeat Onyxia felt immensely satisfying, even though it was like 5 packs of trash in one tunnel, then one big dragon fight in a cavern. In a world where we say Trial of the Crusader proved brief trash fights prior to a raging battle agasint one boss in a single room was a stupid idea, Onyxia felt epic.
Have you done Onyxia, old school or modern remix, and payed attention to the mechanics? They’re quite exciting.
There were fears you had to prepare for… you had to locate yourself where you knew that, when you ate the fear, you would not be forced to run so far that you would facepull the Whelps in the caves to either side.
BUT, you couldn’t be so far away from the Whelp caves that you would eat the Dragon’s breath weapon. And you had to watch where you were standing, because the cracks in the ground would erupt in bursts of lava. And the dragon would knock back whoever had aggro for miles and miles. And the dragon couldn’t be taunted, so you had to generate aggro purely through DPS threat generation, so if you pulled off the tank you were a dead bastard, and since the dragon would likely turn to face the offender, the breath weapon would splash all around.
And that’s just in phase 1!
In phase two, the dragon goes airborne, begins raining down fire and destruction upon the area, whelps burst forth from their caves to swarm the groups, madness and chaos descend… screams, shouts, epic Youtube videos and other delights are the end result.
I loved it. I really did.
My point here is, someone might not have known the ‘optimal’ rotation, have the maxed out gear and enchants, used every single tool in their toolbox… but they were not, in any way, ‘carried’.
They just didn’t put out the maximum possible DPS or Heal, but the mechanics had enough wiggle room to allow for that.
You could reasonably run a raid with a few key dedicated genuises organizing and managing everything at the top level of time investment, a bunch of people in the middle making up the majority of your run theorycrafting and looking for that extra 1% of DPS, and quite a few people at the bottom level that were ‘weekend warriors’.
You really lived or died by the competency of your raid leaders, tanks and primary healers, and they got much respect for their dedication and time investment.
Maybe I remember things differently than they were, or maybe the raiding guild I was in was atypical. Too many years gone by to recall.
Where I’m going with this is, I do agree that back then there was more room for players of all experience levels to fill in one raid from the same guild.
Where I see the drawbacks, and why I wouldn’t ever want to go back, are the difficulties I remember so well in trying to find people you knew you could work together with as a team to fill out all 40 positions, and in coordinating schedules so that all 40 people would actually be online, all at the same time, for the same chunk of playtime.
Those are the two bosses I remember destroying more raids than anything else; attendance and scheduling.
Inevitably, with groups that large, we always, always had people logging in at the last minute without food, flasks or buffs, on the other side of the continent needing summons and begging for handouts.
And then, pre-Repair Bot era, needing to hearth and get re-summoned to fix things still broken from the previous week.
I love that Rohan has given me an excuse to take a trip down memory lane, but all things taken into consideration, while I do miss the epic feel of 40 person raids, I don’t miss the scheduling conflicts, being 15 people short and trying to PUG the rest into MC, and all the rest.
If the argument is that larger raid groups make for more player inclusion in the MMO, and a healthier, more active MMO in the long run, I think Looking For Raid makes for the perfect filler between tight small group raid progression and 5 person instance heroics.
If you really want to relax and pew pew without responsibilities… LFR gives us a home to do it in!
