Tag Archives: patches

Casuals do most of the living and dying in this game, is it too much to have them live and die in a couple of decent epics?

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Whilst I was marveling at the warlock ner … changes as proposed on the World of Warcraft Public Test Realm, aka Patch 2.4 “We Hate You All, but not you rogues because you have so little in this life it would be cruel to take anything away”, I found this nerd rage thread on the WoW PTR forums: To Casuals on a Silver Platter.

I love that thread because there’s a handful of hardcores dueling dozens of casuals — and isn’t that what the Hardcore vs Casual argument is really about? A numbers game, ultimately a profit equation, and in that system Casuals > Hardcore. You live, you learn.

So, hardcore player Altyera of the Dalaran realm, self-described as “… better at this game than you. Much, much, much better”, wrote:

Powerful rewards for people incapable of playing this game seriously? Fine.

Give me something for playing this game well. Give me something for investing three and a half years playing my chosen class to the fullest. Give me something for organizing twenty-five people every week into a well-oiled machine capable of flawlessly tackling complex encounters. Give my members something special for beating the game.

Give me a title for killing every boss in the game. Make my name sparkle and the ground glow at my feet.

Give me a 310% mount for killing Illidan. It’s no less an accomplishment than Gladiator.

Give me an entire array of legendary weapons dropping from Illidan, Archimonde and Kil’jaeden. What casual could complain that they’re not well-earned?

Give me and the top 500 guilds a private forum to converse directly with the developers.

Give me early access to private test realms, expedited character copies and a direct line to the developers while I’m testing content.

You’re giving an awful lot to casual players in this patch. Give me back as much as I put into this game. Great, fun stuff for casuals is awesome, and it’s one reason WoW is so popular. Give the top 1% some incentive to continue investing the time and effort necessary to stay at the top of this game.

Gear that is 3% better than a casual player’s and a couple fancy titles for doing things that no longer matter are far, far less than we deserve.

This is what I love about the Hardcore vs Casual debate as the Hardcores frequently argue: it’s not enough that Casuals get less, or later, than the Hardcores, they have to get much less, preferably much later.

Here’s some more:

Reply #60

The people who consider themselves casuals ruin the game for the people that play it with the purpose of trying to accomplish something they consider great. They spoil the rewards earned by people who put the time, effort, and thought into raiding.

HAHAHA. You casuals are RUINING the game for the people who accomplish GREAT things. Oh fercrissakes.

Reply #13

I have seen people with families and careers get to illidan and farm BT….nobody has an excuses anymore except lack of trying and just plain giving up or being a paraplegic, down-syndrome monkey. Why should they be entitled to free stuff for not trying when the people that actually try get exactly the same things? Its beyond silly…

Parapalegics don’t deserve epics either, I guess. Nice attitude, asshole.

Reply #26

Oh wait, I forgot that most casuals are god-awful at this game.

Pssst, so are most hardcores.

Reply #37

You just can’t talk to them Alty, they refuse, can’t, and never will understand anything about risk/reward in the game, or life.

He’s probably one of those gamers who are CEO of their own start-ups pulling down six figures while married to the super-model wife and raising six children. Even on my own WoW server, we have a lot of those. I assume they’re passing out WoW boxes with subscriptions to Fortune and The Wall Street Journal.

Reply #139

Raiders and hard-core pvper’s make-up the core and soul of this game. Kill that and kill the game. All you are doing is catering to make sh1t so damn easy my unborn child could clear every instance in the game within a week. I’m wondering when they will be giving away epics upon creating an account.

Hyperbole can be an effective argument tool. This would not be a good example of such.

Every EverQuest and Ultima Online player remembers a day when there was no choice like we have in WoW now. I didn’t play UO, but I did play EQ and there was no casual play — everything required a guild, and an able guild at that. (Ok, there was roleplaying and cyber, but we’re talking about gear and character advancement here, stud.) That wasn’t good.

Sure it was great killing Nagafen with 60 people, or getting your class epic (thanks to your guild, and possibly the entire server), but it would have been nice to have another option to get stuff. The stuff didn’t have to be the best, just better than the stuff we had. Choice would have been nice.

Today’s raiders do deserve better rewards, yes — they put in more time and deal with headaches that a solo player will never know — but we should not argue for a big gear gap. Never, never, never should we argue for a big gear gap.

One reason: recruitment.

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The 2.4 Nerfing Heats Up

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World of Warcraft’s dev-head Kalgan (Tom Chilton to his mom) is taking a beating today across the forums. He’s no stranger to hate, particularly on the priest forums, but the accusations are flying today in light of the updated Patch 2.4 notes. (Here’s the WoWWiki page — and more links! — with the history of the forum term “Kalganism”. Definition, briefly: to be nerfed in order to favor Kalgan’s latest PVP character, usually his warrior.)

Nevermind that I know about 234,509 warriors who would disagree that other classes have been nerfed to favor their PVP performance, what’s relevant to this discussion is today’s hate.

Some additional class changes for Patch 2.4 were announced today, principally nerfing to elemental shaman. And priests. (And rogues? Whew, the rogue beating doesn’t appear fatal. Again! HA HA HA!)

Now here’s the big accusation: Must Read If You Care About Anything .. Ever. And I fully expect that thread to die a mysterious death, but I’m prepared this time! (Thread died while I was typing. What a shock. Links to the screenshots are at the end.)

Anyways, posting alt Jayne of the Akama realm wrote:

This isn’t a troll, and is entirely true.

1) There is a non-blue player named “Leiah” who regularly posts on the warlock forms about upcoming patch changes, sometimes as much as months in advance.

2) Leiah was formerly an arena partner with Kalgan’s (the developer) warrior, as well as a member of the same guild. He has acknowledged this in the past, and it is generally well-known.

3) Leiah has claimed to have influenced design decisions as a result of his banter and feedback with the developer — most notably he suggested in mid-January that elemental shamans had too much burst damage, and that, as Leiah put it, “Kalgan sees it my way”, and that a mechanic change was upcomming.

4) Leiah is now bragging on the warlock forums about how the changes he demanded have been implemented on the PTR — and he is entirely correct. The suggestions he made were implemented almost exactly the way he said that he wanted them done over a month ago. This was long before leaked patch notes or any sort of official Blizzard communication.

This is not a blizzard developer making decisions based on hard knowledge or numbers. This is just a friend of a developer who has an inside ear, and is producing results based solely on his limited player experiences.

What is upsetting is that he is allowed to then disseminate this information on the forums as childish bragging and gloating. The shaman community learned about their major 2.4 nerfs from some random guy telling them to “QQ” on the warlock forums… only to have it proven totally true a month later.

So the next time you are wondering if Blizzard really hates your class, or just who in the hell is calling the shots, look no further than some chums of the developers who got bested by your class/spec a few times and complained about it.

Then fanbois and haters alike climb aboard for the flame train and we’re off!

Normally, I’d also dismiss this as fantasy, but I’m gonna guess what’s really going on here is some nobody (Leiah in our example) thinks he’s/she’s somebody when he/she posts about the casual conversations he/she has had with the Kalganator while doing arenas. Obviously, this is a big no-no to players and SHOULD BE to the gaming companies, and probably is to most, but there is a history around here of employees getting (too?) cozy with their guilds and their gaming mates.

However. It could be as simple as how my arenas and battlegrounds go.

Me: I really hate blood elf paladins.
Partner: Ya, me too. Blood elf anything.
Me: You’re not hearing me. I REALLY fucking hate blood elf paladins. I want them DEAD! I want their families DEAD! I want their houses burned to the ground!

And if I was a dev-head, and my partner was an IDIOT and posted that BELF paladins were about to take it in the rear, then tada! BELF paladins take it in the rear, that would look pretty bad. Y’see that’s the thing with non-disclosure type jobs: you have to keep your hands clean, and your hands have to look clean too.

That’s why I wonder … why has this boasting and nerf-threatening been going on for months? Allegedly.

And I wonder this too: why in God’s name would a higher-level dev name his game character the same as his forum persona? Please tell me they don’t because that’s stupid.

I don’t know Kalgan and his posts well enough to hate him like some of the WoW players, but I tell you this … if he’s in charge of bag space, he’s on my list. The same list as BELF paladins.

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Twenty Things Foton Did on Holiday

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Here’s the quick version of what I’ve been up to the past month, besides taking some time off to sharpen my axe:

1. Holidays. Duh.
2. Traveling for the holidays.
3. Finished a major project at work. Ka-ching!
4. Traveling for work. Bleh.
5. Updated the blog software and ruined the site … on New Year’s Day while VERY hung over. That was fun.
6. Told 1/3 of our World of Warcraft guild membership to GTFO of our guild. We realized it was more efficient to have them type /gquit then go down the list and /gkick. Really saved a lot of time.
7. Explained on Vent that we really did mean it.
8. No. Seriously. GTFO.

Here’s the thing. Every goddamn year around Christmas time, raiding guilds go through this period where people are traveling or spending time with their families or both, cuz THAT’S WHAT NORMAL PEOPLE DO. So, of course, the raiding (read: the loot train) slows down or grinds to a halt, only to pick up again after the holidays have passed. And every goddamn year, there’s a group of players who begin to panic when the loot train isn’t chugging down the tracks. “Are we disbanding?” “Will we raid again?” “This guild is dead!!”

Fercrissakes, it’s two weeks out of the year and these losers can’t wait for people to get back to their computers.

So our officers told the losers not to panic, and, after the holidays, they’d see, everything would be back to normal.

Apparently, losers don’t have access to calendars, and in their world, the holidays are over December 26th. Therefore, they had been more than patient by waiting until January 1st to start issuing ultimatums like … replacing our long-serving officers and giving King Loser the guildleader rank. (Riiight.)

See #5 above. I was trying to put out a fire on Ye Olde Blog while alt-tabbed at the PVP lounge and those sonuvabitches are complaining because we’re not in Serpentshrine Cavern and goddammit, turn over that guildleader tag and give them admin rights to all the web resources and the Ventrilo server so they can get to it.

The officers said, “So go raid SSC, nothing stopping you.” And indeed, they were welcome to raid SSC, there was nothing stopping them.

Not good enough. They wanted the raid leader to stop playing his alt and lead the raid; they wanted me to stop screwing around at the PVP battlemasters and heal the raid on my priest alt; and pretty much everyone to stop what they’re doing for a good old-fashioned New Year’s Day raid in Serpentshrine Cavern.

It was one of those super-rare moments when everyone’s temper blows at once. In short, every single officer online issued a “GTFO” (or some variation thereof), and me, late to the party, added my GTFO on Ventrilo … y’know, for the illiterate in the audience.

Those that GTFO are now on their third post-Foton guild.

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