Posts with tag gamer-discussion

Some people are just driven by the need to make things, whether it's art, writing, or any other kind of craft. World of Warcraft certainly seems to have a wealth of crafty types, who use their skills and expertise to do everything from making shoes to sewing adorable plushies to truly amazing cosplay. But while there are plenty of crafty players, not everyone has the talent or inclination. So tell us, do you World of Warcraft craft? If so, what's your craft of choice and why?

And, for those of us with neither crafting inclination or talent, well, we can always enjoy the work of others -- or just enjoy playing the game!

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Wandering around outside of Azeroth, in the so-called real world, you'll see a lot of World of Warcraft players. Some you'll spot with class t-shirts, others drive cars with alliance or horde window stickers (or even custom license plates), some may wear WoW-themed jewelry, and some even have WoW tattoos. But not everyone feels the need to show off their WoW fandom in an obvious way -- or even at all.

So what about you, readers? Do you have a WoW-themed t-shirt collection so you always have the right shirt for the occasion? Or is there some subtler way you like to show off your WoW love?

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.

I was smirking my way past the Gordon Ramsay-esque commentary on Twitter recently (go to the tweet to view it in all its unblurred, NSFW glory) when it struck me: Blizzard has created so many incentives to play a healer. Obviously, they've worked -- but are the healers enjoying it?

As a long-time healer, I find myself broken-hearted at the idea that players are going through the motions of healing simply because for the sake of faster random queue times or to fill a hole in a roster lineup. Healing by people who aren't passionate about healing? Healing by people who aren't glued to the action? Healing by people who might be watching "other things" on another screen, or eating pizza, or, or ...? Dear readers, we're talking about saving lives here. I weep. Seriously, I weep.

Still, there seem to be quite a lot of healers going about their business in today's game. If you're a healer, do you enjoy the role? Did you choose to be a healer of your own volition, or were you influenced by queue times, role benefits, or the needs of your raid or guild? If you were nudged into healing by outside forces, has it been worth it? Are you a happy healer or a reluctant healer?

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I didn't start playing World of Warcraft right at launch, but it's safe to say that I've been playing for a long while. For me, WoW is the video game equivalent of an old, worn t-shirt: it's comfortable and familiar. It's a game I often launch when I'm not looking for something fun and distracting, but not anything that's going to challenge me too much. I still find WoW to be a lot of fun -- I wouldn't keep playing if I didn't! -- but it's still usually something I play with the television on in the background.

But sometimes, still, even after all these years, WoW does things that manage to surprise me. Of course WoW has new content -- lately, it's come more quickly than ever -- but even, sometimes, when I'm not looking for it, I'll run into something new. Now and then I bump into quest text I hadn't read carefully before, a Cataclysm change that I'd never noticed, or an Easter egg the developers snuck in.

And you, reader? Do you keep finding that WoW surprises you?

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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.

Alterac Valley sets my towers aflame. I fell in love with AV during classic WoW, in those sprawling, drawn-out matches that spun out over a day or longer. With a big map and plenty of time, you can savor the micro-encounters that make up a true battle -- that exquisitely frozen moment when you come face to face with an opponent behind a bunker, the off-objective chase that neither of you will give up, the "happy" grudges that leave you seeking out the same opponent the moment you respawn. I gulp down that stuff like water. Objective-driven play has its appeal, but it's the serendipitous moment of connection with the enemy that really turns my flag.

I have a friend who adores siege weaponry. For him, PvP queuing means a beeline for Wintergrasp, Strand of the Ancients, or Isle of Conquest. That's fine. While he's staying busy with catapults and cannon, I'll be slowly throttling some newly met nemesis in the somber shadows behind the keep.

What do you enjoy most about your favorite battleground? Is it something that's there by design, or is it some player dynamic or bit of byplay that fires you up?

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I no longer remember the exact boss or who was raiding with me, but I do clearly remember having a conversation with a friend while I was healing Karazhan. At the time, I was grumbling that I didn't think we had the right group composition to do an encounter successfully -- but it was only after the group's other healer died that my friend agreed. Of course it was then that I decided this wasn't going be a wipe -- something I hadn't thought was possible until just then. (Certainly no one was more surprised than I was when I pulled it off.)

Whether raiding or not, we all have close calls in game -- that was only one of many I've had. But it was certainly memorable. So what about you, dear readers? Share your stories, your near-misses, your especially memorable almost-but-not-quite deaths.

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When you've decided to create a new character in WoW, you'd think the actual creation part would be the easiest part of the process. After all the hard part ought to be leveling, advancing, and collecting gear. But for some players (myself included), character creation itself poses a challenge. If you've picked a class, there's still the question of which race to choose -- or if you've picked a race, the question of which class. And, while WoW's character creation mini-game is far from elaborate, there's still the matter of just what your character looks like. But most difficult of all tends to be picking the right name: WoW's been around long enough that many of the names you might usually use in a game have likely been taken.

So tell us, early morning readers: what's your character creation challenge? Does name selection cause you to stumble? Do you have to get your character's look just right? Or is character creation something you fly through, eager to get to the real game?

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If you'd ever care to observe a WoW player heat up to a slow boil and finally explode in a spectacular, spittle-flecked rage over a minor technical issue, find someone whose favorite character model suffers clipping issues. Most long-term players have a character who can't wear or wield a much-loved item because it does something annoying -– clips through their back, chops off their hair, or disappears into the ground. This is a shoulder-shrugger of an issue to me, but for players who want their favorites to look their best, graphics clipping is utterly incensing.

After eight years, we've had ample time to grow weary of the ugliest graphical glitches that persist in the game. The old character models get cited for a variety of abuses. Night elf hands/mittens, anyone? Creepy. Sometimes, it's their expressions -– the terrifying rictus on a female night elf when she's "smiling." Just look at that screenshot up there. Definitely zombie material. And I know this isn't a superficial issue, because I swim. Ever looked up the skirt of a robe-wearing class while they're swimming? You can see their brains.

Blizzard's deft art direction and over-the-top, cartoon-ish fantasy aesthetic smooths over a multitude of aging and sins, but at some point, rough edges simply refuse to stay hidden. What do you find to be the most appalling graphical eyesore in today's WoW? Is it part of the older character models or landscapes and dungeon textures? Is there some aspect of WoW's graphics that shouts "old and tired" every time you see it?

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Word on the street is that fewer players maintain level 90 alts these days, preferring to concentrate their efforts on a single main character and goof off in the 1-to-90 game rather than the endgame. Does that sound like you? And if it does, has it affected your grasp of gameplay mechanics for the classes other than your main?

I've never been a member of the "one of everything" crew. My typical realm loadout is a level-capped priest, a mid-range paladin and mage, sometimes a high-level rogue, and a banker -- and then more priests, paused at varying states of leveling up alongside now-inactive partners or guild groups. I've earned my understanding of other classes through hours painstakingly assembling raid strategies during early WoW (before the advent of the Dungeon Journal and boss videos) or, more recently, via hard knocks in PvP -- the best teacher, in my humble opinion. Nothing lends a dawning awareness of how another player's skill works better than an injection of quick, brutal death with it.

How familiar are you with the mechanics of today's WoW classes? Do you know all the contemporary systems like the back of your hand, or do certain specs or classes remain a mystery? Do you play the classes you seek to understand, or do you conduct your field research in other ways?

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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?

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Just the other day, we talked about your favorite Mists 5-man instance or scenario. Turn about's fair play -- and come on, what's a little grousing and griping among friends?

You git what you git, and you don't have a fit. The 5-man instances we have in the game right now are all we're getting for the rest of the Mists expansion. But with new scenarios keeping things fresh, we'll have plenty of material to rescue us from instances or scenarios we've come to find an utter drag.

So let it all out: What's your least favorite Mists of Pandaria 5-man instance or scenario? Do the revisions of Scarlet Monastery or Scholomance rub you the wrong way? Is there something about a barrel full of monkeys that's less than a barrel full of monkeys to you?

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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.

You know the feeling: You're doing much more than merely firing on all cylinders. Your performance is absolutely, magnificently beastly. If you're a tank, nothing escapes the force of your presence. If you're healing, the party runs breathlessly without pause, wondering how you're pushing them on DPS. In the face of your DPS, no mob is safe once you're in line of sight. It's a feeling like no other, and it's the kind of gaming experience you remember for years to come.

Raiding can be (to fall back on that ever-popular vocabulary favorite) an epic adventure in World of Warcraft. But in smaller groups -- in 5-man instances and battlegrounds -- players are even more likely to get the chance to experience those peak moments of play when everything comes together to create a real hero tale. Tell us about your best-ever small instance run (5-man only; no raids) or battleground experience -- that time when you not only led the charts but saved the party, turned all the flags, reversed the tides of battle, or carried the day.

Or maybe even all of the above. You hero, you.

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