Community Manager Crithto took to the forums, asking for feedback about changes to the mechanical and elemental pet battle families. As of right now, elemental attacks have both an offensive and defensive advantage over mechanical, making it imbalanced compared to the other families. Blizzard proposes to change which families both types of pets have an advantage against:

One set of changes proposes:

• Critters would replace elementals in taking less damage from mechanical attacks
• Dragonkin would replace critters in taking less damage from elemental attacks
• Elementals would replace dragonkin in taking less damage from flying attacks

and the other:

• Elementals would replace aquatic pets in taking less damage from undead attacks
• Aquatic pets would replace elementals in taking less damage from mechanical attacks

The second set of suggested changes would require less alteration to the current system and therefore has my vote. Do you have an opinion? If so, take advantage of Blizzard's request for player input and cast your vote in the forums.

The full text of Crithto's post is after the break.

Read more →

Filed under: News items

Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm.

This week we have two letter writers having personality conflict problems with fellow guildies.

Hello Drama Mamas,

Long time reader, first time writer. I'll keep this as short and sweet as I can. My problem arises from two things 1. a misunderstanding between two guildmates and 2,) limited activity.

A guild mate and I, in an out of game chatroom, have had some misunderstandings. While I attempt to not bring said things up in game, believing that OoGD (Out of Game Drama) remains OoGD, I am worried that this person should we have to work together, or talk to one another would shun me and be very nasty to me. A point I brought up to one of the Officers and explained that I wasn't sure if I was good a fit in the guild do to the "limited activity." The Officer told the GM, and that was when that whole mess got started. He put most, if not all, of the blame on me even though I had screen shots to prove otherwise. I have tried to smooth things over, even apologizing, and tried to explain to the GM what was going on-with the screenshots-only to be rebuked and told off, presumably (though I don't know for certain as they are good friends) with the other person also told off.

Read more →

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Drama Mamas

Last time we talked about getting rid of funsuckers, but what about the many players who enhance our gametime? Should they be rewarded? How would you go about it?

Perhaps we could have a dropdown box where you could report a player for being extra helpful or otherwise going above and beyond to make your day better. Perhaps someone answered your question politely in tradechat. Or a player asked if you were going for the mining node you were fighting on top of rather than just ninjaing it during your battle. Or maybe someone helped you fight a battle out in the wild that got out of control with adds.

Once someone gathered enough reports of being helpful, what would the rewards be? I would think it would have to be something that doesn't affect gameplay. If it did, guilds may insist on guildies reporting each other has helpful just to skew the system in their favor. Perhaps it would just reward a series of titles. Unfortunately, guilds may still require guildies to report each other in order to get those titles just to collect.

Read more →

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

Last week we discussed how to get rid of the funsuckers making our WoW time less enjoyable. There was quite a bit of discussion in the comments and we had one blogger address the issue as well.

Account-wide ignore
I and others suggested one step in the right direction would be to make ignore account-wide. As long as the other characters on the ignored account were added to the ignore list invisibly, it couldn't be used for griefing.

Peer review
I had also mentioned the Tribunal system that League of Legends uses to police its player base. Commenter Yoojine linked to a video that described the science behind LoL's techniques. If you have the time to look at it, I highly recommend it for those who are interested in studying human behavior. It's fascinating and also heartening that a game company is going through so much effort to make the gameplay experience less toxic for everyone. Basically, they use peer review, direct feedback and the concept of priming to lower the toxicity of the in-game experience. I think that WoW could benefit from Blizzard conducting similar experiments on us.

Read more →

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

This week on Drama Mamas, we discussed a couple that disagreed on how to handle GOGOGO PUGs, the sort that attempt to rush through everything as fast as possible. The tank felt that the DPS who pulled should not be healed, while the healer believed that everyone should be healed indiscriminately. In my opinion, the tank should pull and the healer should stay with the tank, healing others as needed as long as they are in range. But many in the comments disagreed.

Leveling dungeons are, for the most part, easy places to run -- over and over -- for experience and loot. The question is, are they only that or are they also places to practice your role for the endgame? Many commenters believe that endgame playing should be left for max level and that leveling dungeons should be raced through. Others believe that keeping to a standard pace is boring and chain pulling, even by DPS, is the only way to go.

In practice, a tank has little to no queue time, so the pace ends up being whatever the tank wants, else he or she will just accept the votekick and get into another group immediately. Though I don't believe in strongarm tactics, I do think the pace should be set by the tank, even if it ends up being a little slow. Learning on the way up is good. On the other hand, there is a challenge of the GOGOGO team that can be appealing.

What about you? Do you prefer GOGOGO dungeons while leveling? Why or why not?

---

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

Our last Community Blog Topic talked about the bad behavior of guildies to non-guildies and whether it was the result of being in guilds or not. Many people brought up suggestions as to how to police the individuals causing the problems. Unfortunately, some of these suggestions can be exploited to grief non-funsuckers. So the question is, how can we police the bad guys without making things even worse for the good or at least not-so-bad guys?

One suggestion that is constantly brought up is the expansion of the ignore feature. If you could /ignore someone's entire account rather than just the one character, that would prevent the funsucker from getting on another character to harass you. This would be best done anonymously so that only the one character appears on your ignore list, but the remaining characters on the funsucker's account would be silently ignored as well. (If using /ignore account-wide actually listed the ignored characters alts that were also ignored, that could be used by griefers to find people's alts just by temporarily ignoring them, so it would have to work anonymously.) I think that the ignore should work on all of the ignorer's characters as well so that logging on to an alt doesn't expose you to the player you've already ignored on your main.

Read more →

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

Last week, we tackled the topic of what World of Warcraft would be like without guilds. This was prompted by a comment by rayden54 suggesting that the community in general and PUGging in particular would be better without guilds, as they foster cliques as well as bad behavior toward non-guildmates.

My answer primarily dealt with the fact that guilds would happen regardless of whether Blizzard formally implemented guilds in the game, but that even without them, PUGs would be the same or worse since it's anonymity and lack of accountability that breeds bad behavior. Certainly there are guilds that have members who are rude outside of their guild, but all good guilds that I've belonged to have rules against giving the guild a bad name by being a funsucker. Guilds without those rules don't keep their non-funsuckers long.

Read more →

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

Last week, the It came from the Blog family of guilds held its annual Running of the Orphans. As the name suggests, we ran our orphans around, completing the Orgrimmar Children's Week quests.

After we picked up our orphans from the matron, we took the zeppelin from Orgrimmar to Tirisfal Glades. We ran (no mounts, no ports, no summons) to have an audience with Lady Sylvanas in the Undercity. Then we ran back to the zeppelin, making the return trip to Org. Next, since some players did not have the flightpath to Thunder Bluff, we took the zeppelin there (AKA the Love Zeppelin) and ran out to Red Rocks to honor the fallen chieftain. We ran back to town and then took the flightpath right back to Orgrimmar.

Read more →

Filed under: Events, It Came from the Blog

Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm.

The duo in the letter disagrees and so does our Drama Mamas duo.

Hello Drama Mamas!

I recently moved in with my boyfriend, Sam, who I dated long distance for two years. I have never been happier! As you know, sometimes certain things that weren't a problem when long distance can become big ugly problems when living together.

When we were long distance, Sam and I made several WoW pairs together, so we could play and be together and have fun. Almost all of those pairs have me tanking (because I love leading and tanking and fast queues keep us entertained) and some of these pairs have him healing me as I tank.

All too often tanks are treated poorly. I understand that tanks may not seem necessary when leveling, but I wish more DPS would understand that many tanks find proper tanking fun, and so pulling ahead and ripping aggro can be an act of outright funsucking.

Read more →

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Drama Mamas

Today is the last day of Children's Week. After today, thousands of non-pvpers will stay out of battlegrounds for a year and most of us will have another pet or 3 in our stable. Since the pets are tradeable, my guess is that this holiday is getting more attention due to pet battles. Is that true?

My goal was to finally get the meta as School of Hard Knocks is the only thing standing between me and a Violet Proto-drake. As of this writing, I still haven't, but I have time. And so do you, if you're reading this early enough. According to the in-game calendar, the event ends at 11 a.m. PDT. Though I'm not sure how that works. Does the Matron just vanish?

Regardless, what about you?

---

Filed under: Breakfast Topics