This NPC from World of Warcraft must really like Thousand Needles to have commissioned a painting of the zone. And maybe if he cleaned those windows, he would have a nice view into … what zone?
They built this city on rock (and roll) in Lord of the Rings Online:
(I really hate that song, but everytime a guild officer gears up for a Ventrilo speech with “We built this guild on …”, I like to interrupt with “rock and roll?”. I’ll bet that’s really infuriating.)
Yesterday I was kicked out of my guild raid before liftoff. I will say, the kick was entirely deserved. I get tired of sitting around outside the raid zone waiting on the last 1/3 of the raid to show up. But now I’m just making excuses: I was being a dick, I got kicked for being a dick, end of story.
Anyways, I spent my newfound free time snooping around rival guild sites and rediscovered an internet phenomenon that is both amusing and disturbing: oversharing.
Contemporary example from gaming: “It figures that the day some girl is in my bed wanting me I can’t even perform. Thinking about it today I thought it was kinda funny, so I just figured I’d share. On a serious note though I believe I am going to have to take a break from WoW.”
I blame social networking for the steep rise in oversharing. Honestly, I have deep thoughts maybe a couple of times a day, the rest of the thinking is just noise and doesn’t even hold my own interest. Social network sites encourage people to share absolutely everything and I think people should self-censor the more graphic details, PARTICULARLY when one is speaking to one’s guildmates or servermates or the internet at large.
And yet, people share it all. Anonymity grants courage, I suppose.
What I want from you are your own examples of gaming friends or acquaintances oversharing — or, if you’re feeling clever, invent an example of gross oversharing in a game environment.
I’ll go first. Back in EverQuest, raiding Vex Thal, one of our female priests left the raid after a few hours because she was pregnant and her hemorrhoids were bothering her. My opinion, then and now, “I’m not feeling well” would have been sufficient. The bright side: she didn’t detail HOW they were bothersome.
Another example, also EQ, one of our druids announced that she had asked her husband for a divorce earlier that day. The story could have ended there. She explained, however, that he had gotten home late from work and when she went to kiss him, she could smell another woman’s **censored** on his face. I had no response to that.
Your turn to share … but not too much.
If I still was a PVPing shadow priest, or if I had ever been a PVPing warlock, I would not be happy about this change at all:
In the next major content patch, the combat rating, resilience, will also reduce the damage dealt by damage over time (DoT) effects. As it currently stands, each new tier of equipment adds to the amount of damage DoT abilities have, yet that damage is not mitigated through combat ratings found on typical equipment. This change will help ensure that DoT effects do not scale too well compared to other damage mechanics.
The amount of damage reduced will be equal to the critical chance reduction effect that resilience grants. Love, Eyonix
(I added the Love signature because that’s what the World of Warcraft needs now.)
While the warlock and shadow priest tears sustain us, I’m wondering: what can be done to revitalize a mature game?
Let’s be blunt, Warcraft PVE is aging like a president, and no matter how anyone spins the subscription numbers, players and guilds are losing interest. PVP, for many players, is a pleasant diversion from the grindiness of PVE, and, I’d wager, fixing/changing/adding PVP is a helluva lot cheaper than any PVE changes. I’d PVP more myself, but it’s too damn expensive to swap between a PVP and PVE talent spec every few days — not to mention the paperwork involved.
I’m just thinking out loud in e-print, but this game needs something. Well-spun subscription numbers aside, we can all see the attrition around us, and even though there’s lots of interesting ideas on how to energize this game … my opinion, Blizzard is too plodding and too stubborn to try those interesting ideas any time soon.
So choose your poison, Warcraft player: PVP, Raiding PVE, Heroics x 1 billion, or the alt lifestyle. It’s a long wait until the next expansion … or Warhammer Online.