Movin' On Up

Nocturne is taking a break for the month of April, because even the most noble beasts must rest and replenish themselves to approach their rigors with new strength. Also because Zenhakar is a big ol' jerk that puts his school and career ahead of ICC.

Fine whatever, I don't need them; after all, the Chinese character for blah blah blah. I've seized this moment to walk off the beaten path to do something I normally wouldn't do. Not PVP, god no, I haven't suffered massive head trauma and started to think RPG PvP is at all ever remotely a good idea. No, I'm joining a 25-man ICC guild made up of TOTAL STRANGERS. Oh me oh my.

I often rag on Blizzard for making 25-man the default raiding format for a multitude of reasons, some of which aren't totally selfish. And it occured to me, I haven't really ever DONE 25-man in WotLK. I did some in BC, mainly 2 SCC, 1 Mag, and the easy half of TK, and found them all to be the suck compared to the more intimate and immediate environment of Kara and ZA. This may be the only time I ever refer to liking Kara even with heavy qualification, so enjoy it.

So why do it now, when I hated in back in BC? For science, or maybe for this blog to give me something fresh to write about? NO. It is out of pure greed, perhaps tempered with boredom, that I make this foray in to the terrifying world of 25-mans. Blizzard finally got to me with Nibelung, that sweet siren beauty. I can imagine their meetings: "Hey, there are still people out there who like 10-man raiding." "Well, how about in ICC, we make the 10-man items slightly weaker in stats like normal, but change out the really cool/fun procs for garbage procs and on-use abilities. They'll look stupid and contribute nothing to DPS, and they'll be shamed into coming over." I'm looking at you, Abracadaver.

Now I can't talk anymore, I need to pour over gear lists for 2 hours to figure out how the hell I can make up 101 hit without using anymore of my AMAZINGLY AWFUL tier gear.

LFG Needs Help

Yeah, yeah, we were all super stoked on LFG when it came out in 3.3. But with the nightmarish hellscape of daily heroics behind us, we can look with untainted eyes on LFG, and see that there are indeed problems with it.

The biggest problem is the grind. Every single day, log in, play for 20-40 minutes. That is not how I spend my leisure time. Mondays I go straight from work to tabletop night, but there's always this small pang of guilt for not getting my two badges. And doing just one dungeon one time isn't a fulfilling recreation either; I like to play games for a few hours at a time, but without a real incentive, I feel like I'm wasting my time doing more than one dungeon.

This is more of a problem with the whole daily quest model than with LFG itself. There's this whole paradigm in WoW of incentivising daily play, and I hate it, and I can't be alone in that. Solution? Scale everything you do daily to be a weekly quest. Imagine instead of logging on every day to do one dungeon, you could do 7 in one day and be set? Or do one every day, or three one day and four the next? A weekly of "do 7 dungeons get 15 EoF" would be like sweet ambrosia.

The other problem I see is that there's no way to give real positive feedback about a player. If someone's bad I can ignore them or vote to kick, true, but friending someone doesn't make you more likely to group with them in the future. If bad behavior can be punished, there ought to be some symmetry there.

If you use Pandora, firstly, congratulations, you're living in the future. But more importantly, you've seen how effective its heuristics are at matching you with songs you like. Imagine if this was done with players in WoW, and you could give individuals thumbs up or down. Maybe you love multi-pulls and thumbs-up every geared tank who moves real fast. The system would match you with tanks other people with similar tastes also recommended. Conversely, if you hate chatty types, thumbs-down the chatterbox and subsequently see less of them! The math is all there, these kinds of things have been done before, it just needs to be put in the WoW architecture.

I don't mean to suggest LFG is fundamentally broken, or bad. It's smart, easy, and a VAST improvement on the suck of daily heroics. But there's still room for improvement, and in the case of the daily -> weekly transition, it's an easy fix. Blizz've said themselves LFG feels to grindy, so maybe Cata will move away from the daily grind somewhat.

And there was much rejoicing.

The Oft-Maligned Buff

I've seen some trash talked about the ICC party buff, which is properly a planned, steady ICC nerf. What the hell are people talking about, the buff is awesome.

OK, so by the time the buff came out, there were two groups of folks: Kingslayers and the rest of us. This was intentional, getting the Arthas kill before any buffs is a great accomplishment indeed, hooray for you. If you're in that first group, Arthas has already been killed, so you're just grinding him out for gear, probably to aid in your heroic runs. In that case, welcome anything that speeds up the grind! You've already proven you can kill him head-on, taking it easy from here is just a sweet deal.

What if you're not a Kingslayer? Then you likely are harangued on some difficult point, and progression has likely slowed down to the speed of plate tectonics. I know Nocturne had immense difficulty getting Rotface onto farm (I've heard most guilds have that problem with Festergut. Not us, our DPS is pro.) At any rate, spending 3 hours dying to these kinds of snags is insanely soul-crushing. Even more soul-crushing than the daily heroic mechanic (more on that later!). So a small boostie to get the rest of us over that progression-hump to get to see this expansion to the end is welcome as well.

If you've ever played a Devil May Cry game, you know about "unlocking" easy mode. Basically, the game starts you in Normal, which is tuned for very good and persistent gamers looking for a ball-stomping challenge. If you die several times within the first few levels, the game unlocks easy mode, which is tuned for your average-joe gamer type. The point is to give the player a chance to rise to the opportunity first, then give them the option of a shallower difficulty curve, one better suited to their skill level.

If there's one thing I could say is wrong with the buff, it's that there is no achievement for killing every boss WITHOUT the buff. I'm sure some guilds want to prove they can do the instance without the buff's help, and some way to immortalize that accomplishment is sorely needed. Think of it as hard mode light. Firm mode. Medium-well mode.